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.