Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the way to work, many women sit on the sidewalk with sacks of bread beside them.  No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they walk along.  They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea to be obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses.  It is incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day’s work on a meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will fall upon his employer and upon the nation.  For some time, now, statesmen have been crying, “Wake up, England!” It would show more hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to “Feed up, England!”

Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed.  I have stood outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef and mutton—­dog-meat in the States.  I would not vouch for the clean fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess about in their anxiety to get the worth of their coppers.  I kept my eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit of meat, and followed it through the clutches of over twenty women, till it fell to the lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed into taking it.  All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.

The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and sleeping room for the night.  There it is exposed to the sickness and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.

The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good, wholesome meat or fruit—­in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at all; while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of what he eats.  Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or cocoa tastes like.  The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea and coffee.

A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.

“Cawn yer let me ‘ave somethin’ for this, daughter?  Anythin’, Hi don’t mind.  Hi ’aven’t ‘ad a bite the blessed dy, an’ Hi’m that fynt . . . "

She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she held a penny.  The one she had addressed as “daughter” was a careworn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.