[London’s Underworld by Thomas Holmes]@TWC D-Link book
London’s Underworld

CHAPTER II
10/23

Here women work and starve, and here childhood, glorious childhood, is withered and stricken; but here, too, the wicked, the vile, the outcast and the thief find sanctuary.
The strange mixture of it all bewilders me, fascinates me, horrifies me, and yet sometimes it encourages me and almost inspires me.

For I see that suffering humanity possesses in no mean degree those three great qualities, patience, fortitude and endurance.
For perchance these three qualities will feel and grope for a brighter life and bring about a better day.
Though in all conscience funerals are numerous enough in this bit of the underworld, and though the conditions are bad enough to destroy its inhabitants, yet the people live on and on, for even death itself sometimes seems reluctant to befriend them.
Surely there is nothing in the underworld so extraordinary as the defiance flung in the face of death by its poor, feeble, ill-nourished, suffering humanity.
According to every well-known rule they ought to die, and not to linger upon the order of their dying.

But linger they do, and in their lingering exhibit qualities which ought to regenerate the whole race.

It is wonderful upon what a small amount of nourishment humanity can exist, and still more wonderful under what conditions it can survive.
Shall we look in at a house that I know only too well?
Come again, then! Here sits an aged widow of sixty-four at work on infants' shoes, a daughter about twenty-six is at work on infants' socks.

Another daughter two years older is lying on her back in an invalid's chair, and her deft fingers are busily working, for although paralysis has taken legs, the upper part of her body has been spared.


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