"Have you any reverence for womanhood? Are you men? If you come here and
look upon these women, you shall feel a burning scorn for the blazoned
lies of English chivalry and English piety and English Art.
"Drudging here in these vile stews day after day, night after night;
always with the wolf on the poor doorstep gnashing his fangs for the
clinging brood; always with the black future, like an ominous cloud
casting its chill shadow on their anxious hearts; always with the mean
walls hemming them in, and the mean tasks wearing them down, and the
mean life paralysing their souls; often with brutal husbands to coax
and wait upon and fear; often with loafing blackguards--our poor
brothers--living on their earnings; with work scarce, with wages low,
in vile surroundings, and with faint hopes ever narrowing, these London
women face the unrelenting, never-ceasing tide of inglorious war.
"If you go there and look upon these women, you will feel suddenly
stricken old. Look at their mean and meagre dress, look at their warped
figures, their furrowed brows, their dim eyes. In how many cases are the
poor features battered, and the poor skins bruised? What culture have
these women ever known; what teaching have they had; what graces of life
have come to them; what dowry of love, of joy, of fair imagination? As
I went amongst them through the mud and rain, as I watched them plying
their needles on slop-garments, slaving at the wash-tub, gossiping or
bandying foul jests in their balcony cages, drinking at the bars with
the men--the thought that rose up most distinctly in my mind was, 'What
would these poor creatures do without the gin?'
"The gin--that hellish liquor which blurs the hideous picture of life,
which stills the gnawing pain, which stays the crushing hand of despair,
and blunts the grinding teeth of anguish when the child lies dead of the
rickets, or the 'sticks' are sold for the rent, or the sweater has no
more work to give, or the husband has beaten and kicked the weary flesh
black and blue! What would they do, these women, were it not for the
Devil's usury of peace--the gin?
"My companion took me to a bridge across a kind of dock, and told me
it was known thereabouts as 'The Bridge of Sighs.' There is a constable
there on fixed-point duty. Why? _To prevent the women from committing
suicide_. The suicides were so numerous, he said, that special
precautions had to be taken. And since the constable has been set there,
so eager are the women to quit this best of all possible worlds that
they have been known to come there at night with a couple of women
friends, and to leap into the deep, still water while those friends
engaged the constable in conversation.
"Do you understand it? The woman has been wronged until she can endure
no more; she has sunk till she can struggle no longer; she has been
beaten and degraded until she loathes her life--even gin has ceased
to buy a respite; or she is too poor to pay for gin, and she drags her
broken soul and worn-out body to the Bridge of Sighs, and her friends
come down to help her to escape from the misery which is too great for
flesh and blood to bear. It is a pretty picture, is it not? While our
sweet ladies are sighing in the West End theatre over the imaginary
sorrows of a Manon Lescaut or repeating at church, with genteel reserve,
the prayer for 'all weak women and young children'--here to the Bridge
of Sighs comes the battered drudge, to seek for death as for a hidden
treasure, and rejoice exceedingly because she has found a grave."
Many of these poor women, perhaps most, are mothers. What kind of
environment, what land of stamina can they give their children?
"Take care of the women, and the nation will take care of itself." Here
is another sketch from the _life_, taken in the chain and nail-making
districts of Staffordshire.