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THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
self-respect they have remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their degradation and dirt.
Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are exaggerated, that I am too close to the picture and lack perspective. At such moments I find it well to turn to the testimony of other men to prove to myself that I am not be coming overwrought and addle-pated. Frederick Harrison has always struck me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and he says:—
To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind, except as much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed, for the most part, in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism. . . . But below this normal state of the average workman in town and country, there is found the great band of destitute outcasts—the camp followers of the army of industry—at least one-tenth of the whole proletarian population, whose
