This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion. Nearly fifty per cent of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-half of their earnings for rent. The average rent in the larger part of the East End is from $1.00 to $1.50 per week for one room, while skilled mechanics, earning $8.75 per week, are forced to part with $3.75 of it for two or three pokey little dens, in which they strive desperately to obtain some semblance of home life. And rents are going up all the time. In one street in Stepney the increase in only two years has been from $3.25 to $4.50; in another street from $2.75 to $4; and in another street, from $2.75 to $3.75; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently rented for $2.50 are now costing $5.25. East, west, north, and south, the rents are going up. When land is worth from $100,000 to $150,000 an acre, some one must pay the landlord.
Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning his constituency in Stepney, related the following:—
This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am myself living, a widow stopped me. She has six children to support, and the rent of her house was 14 shillings per week. She gets her living by letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charing. That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had increased the rent from 14 shillings to 18 shillings. What could the
