To apply the name of “home” to these dens is a sheer abuse of words.  What grateful memories of tender childhood, what healthy durable associations, what sound habits of life can grow among these unwholesome and insecure shelters?

The city poor are a wandering tribe.  The lack of fixed local habitation is an evil common to all classes of city dwellers.  But among the lower working-classes “flitting” is a chronic condition.  The School Board visitor’s book showed that in a representative district of Bethnal Green, out of 1204 families, no less than 530 had removed within a twelvemonth, although such an account would not include the lowest and most “shifty” class of all.  Between November 1885 and July 1886 it was found that 20 per cent. of the London electorate had changed residence.  To what extent the uncertain conditions of employment impose upon the poor this changing habitation cannot be yet determined; but the absence of the educative influence of a fixed abode is one of the most demoralizing influences in the life of the poor.  The reversion to a nomad condition is a retrograde step in civilization the importance of which can hardly be exaggerated.  When we bear in mind that these houses are also the workshop of large numbers of the poor, and know how the work done in the crowded, tainted air of these dens brings as an inevitable portion of its wage, physical feebleness, disease, and an early death, we recognize the paramount importance of that aspect of the problem of poverty which is termed “The Housing of the Poor.”

So much for the quality of the shelter for which the poor pay high prices.  Turn to their food.  In the poorest parts of London it is scarcely possible for the poor to buy pure food.  Unfortunately the prime necessaries of life are the very things which lend themselves most easily to successful adulteration.  Bread, sugar, tea, oil are notorious subjects of deception.  Butter, in spite of the Margarine Act, it is believed, the poor can seldom get.  But the systematic poisoning of alcoholic liquors permitted under a licensing System is the most flagrant example of the evil.  There is some evidence to show that the poorer class of workmen do not consume a very large quantity of strong drink.  But the vile character of the liquor sold to them acts on an ill-fed, unwholesome body as a poisonous irritant.  We are told that “the East End dram-drinker has developed a new taste; it is for fusil-oil.  It has even been said that ripe old whisky ten years old, drank in equal quantities, would probably import a tone of sobriety to the densely-populated quarters of East London."[9]