Slums in the gilded West—"It's the place! It's ruin to us all"—Where the children earn and the mothers drink—How the "till sneak" works—Lynch law in London—A slump depression in the burglary trade

IN all great cities there are certain areas which bear an evil reputation. On the principle that birds of a feather dock together, the vicious and the criminal have a habit of seeking each other's society. But though crime and vice are frequently associated, there is often a sharp distinction to be drawn so far as certain quarters of London are concerned.

In the heart of the West End, in the Royal Borough of Kensington itself, there are whole streets in which the inhabitants are vicious, as we understand the word as a label. Here the police are busy, but the bulk of the charges brought against the women and the men are for drunkenness, for disorderly conduct, for fighting and brawling. They are principally night charges, for during the day you may wander the neighbourhood and see little life in the streets that are notoriously ill-famed.

There is one street that from end to end has not a single house in it where there is not a broken window. These houses are packed with a low type of humanity. Every house is a lodging-house, and many of them are lodging-houses for women only.

In the daytime drunken, dissipated-looking women loll in the doorways or thrust their tousled heads out of the upper windows. If you enter these houses and go down into the common kitchen you will find scores of women, young and middle-aged, sitting round the coke fires, listless, often morose. Among them you will see now and again women with traces of refinement, some whose features still bear the lingering traces of youth and good looks.

But they are lost souls every one of them. There is not one among the hundreds who crowd the notorious lodging-houses of this terrible guilt garden of the West who is still making an effort to earn an honest livelihood. Most of them are thieves when opportunity offers. They are not professional thieves, but many of them are in league with rascals of the worst type, loafers and hooligans, who are not ashamed to beat and maltreat women and force money from them.

This district is a district of despair to the philanthropist, the social reformer, and the Christian worker. It has been called the Avenue of the West. It is a cesspool to which all that is worst in the squalid vice of the capital flows. And the pity of it is that the stream is constantly fed by tributaries from the cleaner, greener land beyond. It is here that hundreds of our rural immigrants drift in ignorance or in despair of London's vastness and inhospitality, and here they rapidly deteriorate, and become in time as evil as their environment.

There is no mystery about the character of the people in these streets of shame. And yet the element of mystery greets you at every turn, whether you wander these byways of wickedness by day or by night.

If you would explore the mysteries of the Avemus, it is not in the houses or the streets that you will see the veil lifted.

But stand with me in this room in the school where the mentally and physically feeble offspring of degenerate parents are cared for and taught. Listen to the cry of a woman, who pours her heart out to the sympathetic teacher who has sent for her to give her advice about her little boy.

"It's the place, miss," wails the woman. "It's ruin to us all to be in it. It's ruined his father—it's ruined me, and it's ruining the children. If I could only get out of it! But I can't—I never shall now."

Ten years ago this woman and her husband came from the country to try their luck in London. The man failed to get work, fell in with evil companions, and they drifted to the Avemus. The husband is a loafer—the wife does a little work at a laundry when she can get it. They live in a vile street, where oaths and foul language and brutal deeds are all they hear and see. The house they live in is filled with bad characters. The eldest boy—he came a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked child from the country with his parents—is in prison; the girl, who was bom after they came to the Avemus, is in an idiot asylum; the boy at the school is developing criminal tendencies. The mother sees with despair the min of her family, but she is helpless to avert it. Her husband is a drunkard. She herself has fallen into the slough at last.

Her case is typical of hundreds in the neighbourhood. So terrible is the effect of the environment on the children that day and night the Industrial School officers are searching for girls and boys, whose only hope of salvation is to be separated from their parents.

If you were to spend one night in the Avemus your face would be crimson with righteous indignation that little children should live open-eared and open-eyed in constant contact with such horrors.

Do you see a broad-shouldered, burly, kindly-looking man walking quietly along the street? As he comes into sight a group of lads and lasses disperse as if by magic. There is a sudden bolt up a narrow passage that through a back street leads into the open thoroughfare.

The big man smiles good-humouredly. He has seen the group, and the girl he wants was in it. He will find her before the night is over, because he will enter every house she is likely to have taken refuge in. He is the Industrial School's officer. Three years ago he rescued a girl from evil surroundings and she was sent to Canada. She has managed in some mysterious way to get back again across the sea, and has headed straight for the Avemus, where she has a bad mother, and a father who is worse.

There is nothing brings the shame and degradation of one phase of London life so acutely home to you as a day and a night with the officers whose duty it is to remove the young from the homes and haunts of vice. In one street in the Avemus there are two hundred children growing up. There is not one house in the whole of that street that does not harbour women of the most degraded type.

Many of these children are already busy as money-makers. Some of them are sent out into the streets to beg; to play their carefully planned tricks and dodges on the humanity of the passers-by. There are women who wash their faces, smooth their hair, and dress in seedy black as widows, and take little children out with them to beg. These "poor widows" starve the children and spend the money in drink. Sometimes they don't take their own children; they hire a deformed child or a cripple of a mother who is willing to let it out. There are hundreds of little children now in industrial homes who were forced into the streets to ply the trade of mendicity and mendacity, and who were treated with the most brutal violence by their parents if they came home empty-handed. Many a child, failing to get money by begging, would steal rather than go home to be received with foul words and brutal blows.

This Avernus of the West is an area of vice. The most typical area of crime lies nearer to the City's heart. It has been said, "Wall off Hoxton, and nine-tenths of the criminals of London would be walled off." That is, perhaps, a too sweeping statement, but that there are whole areas in Hoxton inhabited entirely by criminals is a fact beyond dispute. Those criminals are principally thieves and burglars. The majority are of the lowest order, but there are among them several superior "artists"—men who plan and carry out big jobs. The "fences," or receivers of stolen goods, have made quite a little colony here, and the modern trainer of thieves, the Fagin of the twentieth century, has his daily and nightly classes in the neighbourhood.

Look at this row of neat-looking houses. There are blinds and well-arranged curtains at the windows, the handle of the bell is polished, the steps are clean. The signs without bespeak comfort within. These houses are largely occupied by the superior craftsmen in crime. One or two receivers also reside here, and the cleverest trainer of young thieves in London occupies the upper portion of the house that has the best show of flowers in the home-made window-boxes.

It has been my privilege to converse with some of these trainers and to get an insight into their methods. I am not betraying any confidence in publishing what I have learnt of their system, because it is perfectly well known to the police and to the Christian workers who labour among the pupils of the modern Fagin. The boy who is "trained" is, as a rule, taught one branch of the art of robbery only. For instance, a thief who wants to be an expert abstracter of ladies' watches never steals watches from men. If he "mixes his pockets" he loses his delicacy of touch. The fingers must be employed in one way in taking a watch from a man's pocket, and in quite another way in taking a watch from a lady. To steal from the person adroitly and with little fear of detection the fingers must be in constant practice in one particular way. Many a thief who has stolen from women for years with impunity has come to instant grief when, tempted by the apparent carelessness of the owner in a crowd, he has tried to take a watch from a man.

The most difficult branch of the "profession" for the young thief to learn is "counter creeping." To enter a shop on your hands and knees, crawl round behind the counter, and secure the till unnoticed by the shopkeeper requires the most skilful use, not only of the hands, but of the knees. The slightest sound as you crawl along the floor might attract attention. Yet, in spite of its difficulties, this branch of the business has many apprentices, who practise in a room in which an imitation counter is fitted up.

The "till sneak" occasionally acts with an accomplice, sometimes with two. When the favourable shop has been fixed upon, the habits of its owners studied, and the propitious moment chosen, one of the confederates enters as a pretended customer and engages the attention of the shopkeeper—frequently a woman. Another confederate keeps observation outside, and is ready to facilitate the exit of his "pals." The trained till thief creeps in and secures the haul noiselessly.

It often happens that the shopkeeper does not discover the loss until another customer has been served, and he or she goes to the till to put money in it and finds it empty.

But with all their cleverness, with all the risks they run in following their dishonest occupations, these professional thieves seem to make a very poor living.

If you would see how they live, let us go boldly into one of the criminal areas and enter the houses.

Here is the most notorious criminal street in London. The inhabitants are frankly thieves and of a very rough class. In the centre of the street is a lodging-house in which some two hundred thieves are accommodated nightly, and there is hardly a house from end to end in which the weekly rent is gained by honest industry.

Look at this "notice" chalked up in big letters on a wall: "Coppers wanted. Three killed last night."

That is a playful exaggeration. A policeman killed in this street a month or two ago, but only one. The whistle of a hooligan captain sounded, and scores of young roughs poured out of the houses to obey the summons. A "nark," or a lad who was suspected of "marking"—i.e. betraying a comrade by giving information to the police—had ventured into the neighbourhood, and the gang were called forth to administer lynch law. There was a big fight, for the suspected "nark" had pals too. In the course of the combat an unfortunate policeman so far forgot the first law of nature as to enter the street with a view of restoring order. He was so badly knocked about and injured that he died shortly afterwards.

If you enter the houses, which are mostly let at 12s. 6d. a week and taken by one person, who lets off the rooms and lives rent free in the process, you will find the most terrible squalor and apparent misery.

Most of the families live in one room. Occasionally, when one of the girls is old enough to do factory-work and bring home a regular wage, the luxury of two rooms is indulged in.

Here is a criminal family living in one room. There is a broken-down bedstead in the corner, and on it a dirty mattress and a patchwork quilt, originally of many colours, but now of one prevailing hue, that of greasy brown. There is not a chair or a table in the place. There are only a few broken and battered pails and tubs, which serve the purpose of chairs. In one of these tubs a baby is wedged in with rags, and in this position carried out and placed on the pavement. That is because the mother, who is alone, is going out, and there is a fire burning in the battered grate. The baby might play with the fire and burn the bed, and that would be a loss to the family. So the baby is deposited in the tub outside the front door, and left there for the hours that its mother has arranged to be absent.

If you were to enter this room in the small hours you would find it occupied by the grandmother, the mother and her husband, two young girls, and a lad of fifteen. There are two older lads in the family, but they are more comfortably lodged in one of His Majesty's prisons.

Here is the home of a professional burglar. He has only one room at present for himself, his wife, a lad of seventeen, two girls of fourteen and eight, and a baby. Presumably the burglary trade has shared in the general depression, for the family are at dinner when we enter, and it consists of nothing more appetizing than bread and cheese.

In one day I visited the homes of over fifty professional thieves in this district. This burglar was the only one who did not reciprocate my friendly advances. He was surly, and, but for the fact that circumstances compelled him to be civil to the friend who accompanied me, he would, I am sure, have given me a very unpleasant interview. In twenty of the houses I visited, a member was temporarily absent from the family circle. Some were away for six months, some for five years. There was no concealment as to their present address. "In prison," was the frank reply, sometimes made with a smile.

In only one instance was there any trepidation shown at the entry of unexpected visitors. That was when we went downstairs into a kitchen occupied by a middle-aged lady. Hearing strange footsteps, she had hastily attempted to conceal a bulky-looking sack under the bed. She explained her "palpitations" by assuring us that she suffered from heart disease.

As the lady was the wife of a gentleman who receives stolen goods, and has another kitchen at the back in which gold and silver articles are subjected to certain "transforming processes," we quite understood the nervousness which the lady betrayed, and her relief when we bade her good-bye and mounted the stairs again.

There are a dozen streets in this area, every one of them packed with criminals. But everywhere is the sign of squalor and penury. Walk through the streets, and you will see the children ragged, dirty, and barefooted. Nowhere in London is the note of misery so emphasized.

Crime, so far as these areas are concerned, must be a far less profitable occupation than the worst-paid class of honest labour.

And yet these people look solely to crime for their rent, their clothing, and their food, and wouldn't do an honest day's work if it were offered to them.