l66	ENGLISHSAGA
	trespasses on "its own inalienable and untransferable property
—the health, strength, honesty and filial love of its children."
Across the lives of the rich and comfortable, of all who inherited
or had acquired established property they passed like a remote
shadow: to the remainder of their countrymen, especially to the
lower middle-class and the skilled and respectable artisan, they
were a terrible menace whose horrid existence it was almost
impossible to shake from the mind. Their pale, degraded, be-
seeching faces and dripping rags were a reminder of what un-
employment, sickness or any lapse from the straight and narrow
path of social integrity might bring: like wraiths they rose out
of a precipice into which every man without property might at
any moment of his life fall. More than any other cause, they
account for the almost fanatic desire of the Victorian of all
classes to acquire and retain property.
"I recall," wrote Taine, "the alleys which run into Oxford
Street, stifling lanes encrusted with human exhalations; troops
of pale children nestling on the muddy stairs; the seats on London
Bridge where families, huddled together with dropping heads,
shiver through the night; particularly the Haymarket and the
Strand in the evening. Every hundred steps one jostles twenty
harlots; some of them ask for a glass of gin; others say, ^c Sir,
it is to pay my lodging.' This is not debauchery which flaunts
itself but destitution—and such destitution! The deplorable
procession in the shade of the monumental streets is sickening;
it seems to me a march of the dead. That is a plague-spot, the
real plague-spot of English society."^1 Once down in that mire
there was no rising again. The sordid round of drink, debauchery,
violence, punishment, incompetence and hideous destitution
never ceased. "The great social mill crushes and grinds here . . .
the lowest human stratum.*
•        »         •         •         •         •	«         «
For the great individualists who had made nineteenth-century
Britain rich beyond the dreams of avarice had forgotten that
man was part of an undying order. The price of a social crime—
greed, slavery, the oppression of a subject people—is seldom paid
by those immediately guilty of it. It is paid later—by their
innocent descendants. The sins of the fathers are visited on the
children and the children's children.
^Notes on England, 36.