The most rational act for a poor man in East London with a large family is to get rid of it; the conditions in East London are such that they will get rid of the large family for him.Of course, there is the chance that he may perish in the process.Adjustment is not so apparent in this event; but it is there, somewhere, I am sure.
And when discovered it will prove to be a very beautiful and subtle adjustment, or else the whole scheme goes awry and something is wrong.
However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own in Johnny Upright's street.What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various cubbyholes into which I had fitted them, my mind's eye had become narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at once.The immensity of it was awe-inspiring.Could this be the room I had rented for six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady, knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my doubts.
'Oh, yes, sir,' she said, in reply to a question.'This street is the very last.All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago, and all the people were very respectable.But the others have driven our kind out.Those on this street are the only ones left.It's shocking, sir!'
And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental value of a neighborhood went up while its tone went down.
'You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others do.We need more room.The others, the foreigners and lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get one.So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford.It is shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this neighborhood was just as nice as it could be.'
I looked at her.Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English working class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers that be are pouring eastward out of London Town.Bank, factory, hotel, and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading neighborhood by neighborhood, driving the better class of workers before them to pioneer on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, if not in the first generation, surely in the second and third.
It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must go.He realizes it himself.
'In a couple of years,' he says, 'my lease expires.My landlord is one of our kind.He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and this has enabled us to stay.But any day he may sell, or any day he may die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned.The house is bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of ground at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents it a room to a family.There you are, and Johnny Upright's gone!'
And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters, and frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts, flitting eastward through the gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels.
But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting.Far, far out, on the fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and successful clerks.They dwell in cottages and semidetached villas, with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space.They inflate themselves with pride and throw chests when they contemplate the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God that they are not as other men.And lo! down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the monster city at his heels.Tenements spring up like magic, gardens are built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, and the black night of London settles down in a greasy pall.
