THE MARCH OP THE CARAVAN 165-

Property, being sacred, and demanding decorum and rever-
ence in its treatment, conferred respectability. The contrary was
also true: the man without property was suspect. The "snob"
who drove up to a gentleman's door in a public conveyance with
cab straw on his trousers was despised as a low adventurer who
could not afford a carriage. The third class passenger who could
buy no better ticket was kept off the platform until the last
moment lest he should offend his social superiors by his mean
presence. The vagrant without visible means of support was an
object of suspicion to be imprisoned and punished unless he could
prove his bona fides.

From this arose tragic consequences. Poverty in other lands
was regarded, as it had been in England in the past, as part of the
eternal human lot: to be pitied, to be avoided if possible, to be
relieved or ignored according to a man's nature or temperament,
but not to be despised It was a share of humanity's bitter herit-
age, like sickness, tempest and death. But in London and urban
England in which the making of wealth had been elevated into a
moral duty, poverty hung its head for shame. It crept out of sight
into that new phenomenon of industrialisation—the working-
class district in which no man of wealth or position lived. The
new East End of London with its miles of mean, squalid streets
covering an area greater in extent than any continental city, was
something of a portent in the world. It was not for nothing that
the scholar Marx was studying economic phenomena in the
British capital.

Here lived the pooiv-not merely the respectable artisan but the
countless broken outcasts of the industrial system* These were
pallid and gin-sodden; their ragged reeking dothes, which had
passed through many phases of society in their long, declining
history, were so vile that they left a stain wherever they rested:
they stank. They herded together in bug-ridden lodging houses
and rotting tenements: they slept under railway arches and on
iron seats on the new Victoria Embankment. They were the
"submerged tenth," the skeleton at the rich Victorian feast, the
squalid writing on the whitened wall.

They were not merely congregated in the * darkest London" of
Charles Booth's later survey: they were to be found in every place
where the untrammelled march for wealth had broken down the
old world of status and social morality. They were living testi-
monies of that against which Coleridge had warned his country

E.S. M