lows were types of the "submerged tenth," as our missionary guide told
us, with some little satisfaction in the then new phrase, and he further
added that so many of them could scarcely be seen in one spot save at
this Saturday night auction, the desire for cheap food being apparently
the one thing which could move them simultaneously. They were hud'
died into ill-fitting, cast'off clothing, the ragged finery which one sees
only in East London. Their pale faces were dominated by that most
unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the
bargaiivhunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and
yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of
pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic,
nerveless, and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the
street, and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.
Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand,
this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and
with which he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been
able to see a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a
class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a
teachers query, without a certain revival of this memory, a clutching
at the heart reminiscent of the despair and resentment which seized
me then.
For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively, afraid
to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose again this hideous human need and suffering. I carried with me for days at a time
that curious surprise we experience when we first come back into the
streets after days given over to sorrow and death; we are bewildered
that the world should be going on as usual and unable to determine
which is real, the inner pang or the outward seeming. In time all huge
London came to seem unreal save the poverty in its East End. During
the following two years on the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn
to tbe poorer quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of south
Italy nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with it the same
conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this momentary glimpse of an East London street. It was, of course, a most
fragmentary and lurid view of the poverty of East London, and quite
unfair. I should have been shown either less or more, for I went away
with no notion of the hundreds of men and women who had gallantly