It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman’s home was his castle.  But to-day it is an anachronism.  The Ghetto folk have no homes.  They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home life.  Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class workers, are overcrowded barracks.  They have no home life.  The very language proves it.  The father returning from work asks his child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes, “In the buildings.”

A new race has sprung up, a street people.  They pass their lives at work and in the streets.  They have dens and lairs into which to crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all.  One cannot travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs “homes.”  The traditional silent and reserved Englishman has passed away.  The pavement folk are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable—­when they are yet young.  As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer.  When they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates.  They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners, and staring into vacancy.  Watch one of them.  He will stand there, motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still staring into vacancy.  It is most absorbing.  He has no money for beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else remains for him to do?  He has already solved the mysteries of girl’s love, and wife’s love, and child’s love, and found them delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing before the ferocious facts of life.

As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-aged are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid.  It is absurd to think for an instant that they can compete with the workers of the New World.  Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle for industrial supremacy which economists declare has already begun.  Neither as workers nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when England, in her need, calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if England be flung out of the world’s industrial orbit, they will perish like flies at the end of summer.  Or, with England critically situated, and with them made desperate as wild beasts are made desperate, they may become a menace and go “swelling” down to the West End to return the “slumming” the West End has done in the East.  In which case, before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and easily.

CHAPTER XX—­COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES

Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and all that goes to make phrases worth keeping!  For me, henceforth, “coffee-house” will possess anything but an agreeable connotation.  Over on the other side of the world, the mere mention of the word was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians of Grub Street.