If our law-makers, our notable divines, and our good but nervous people had to live under such conditions, I venture to say they would rush into the streets for change of air; and if any steam were left in them, who can doubt but that they would let it off somehow? Under present conditions, the "young gentry" have the choice of two evils--either to stay in their insufferable homes or to kick up their heels in the streets. But this includes two other contingencies--either to become dull-eyed, weak-chested, slow-witted degenerates, or hooligans. Of the two, I prefer the latter. The streets are the playgrounds of the poor, and the State has need to be thankful, in spite of the drawback in disorder and crime, for the strength and manhood developed in them. It will be a sorry day for England when the children of the poor, after being dragooned to school, are dragooned from the streets into the overcrowded tenements called home. Multiply large towns, run the "blocks" for the poor up to the skies, increase the pains and penalties for youthful disorder, and omit to make provision for healthy, vigorous, competitive play: then we may write "Ichabod" over England, for its glory and strength will be doomed. Wealth may accumulate, but men will decay. Robust play, even though it be rough, is an absolute condition of physical and moral health.
Consider briefly how the poor live. Thousands of families with three small rooms for each family, tens of thousands with two small rooms, a hundred thousand with one room. And such rooms! Better call them boxes. Dining-room and bedroom, kitchen and scullery, coal-house and drawing-room, workshop and wash-house, all in one. Here, one after another, the children are born; here, one after another, many of them die. I went into one of these "combines," and saw an infant but a few days old with its mother on a little bed; in another corner, in a box, lay the body of another child of less than two years, cold and still. I felt ill, but I also felt hot. I protest it is no wonder that our boys and girls seek the excitement of the streets, or that they find comfort in "dustbins." What can big lads of this description do in such surroundings? Curl up and die, or go out and kick somebody. The pity of it is that they always kick the wrong person, but that's no wonder. Tread our narrow streets, where two-storied houses stand flush with the pavements; explore our courts, alleys, and places; climb skyward in our much-belauded dwellings; or come even into our streets that look snugly respectable. You will find them teeming with juvenile life that has learned its first steps in the streets, got its first idea of play in the gutter, and picked up its knowledge of the vulgar tongue from those who have graduated in a gutter school. Is it any wonder that young people developed under these conditions look upon the streets as their natural right, and become oblivious to the rights of others? They are but paying back what they have received. Neither is it to be wondered at that as they grow older they grow more disorderly and violent, but altogether less scrupulous. It is absurd to suppose that boys who have grown into young men under these conditions will, on reaching manhood, develop staid and orderly ways, and equally absurd to suppose that by sending them for "trial" they will be made orderly.
