The People of the Abyss

Jack London

From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London's streets! Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to move on. You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is also a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out.
But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer.
Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London Town this night. Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life. It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required. Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say otherwise. What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.

These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived. They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk. They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

Reading The People of the Abyss will do many things to you: it will impress upon your soul the miserable state of the East End of London in 1902; it will make you angry at Jack London; it might make you wonder just when the "developed" world became distinct from the "developing" world, and it might raise this question--how could things be this bad?

There is so much abundance on this planet. Yet somehow we've managed to divide it up in such a way as to keep most of it out of most everyone's hands. But how could you divide it better? Many people I respect would say that the best way to divide everything is through the freedom of capitalism. But while this seems to be a good idea, isn't it evident that one of the basic premises of capitalism is not in effect? There is no equal starting point. At least a third of the world is receiving a substantial head-start, so substantial that many of the rest might as well give up the race. So how do we divide it better?

In the vein of Jack London, perhaps a little observation is in order. Recently traveling, this is what I saw: I went through four airports (Seattle, Chicago, Ft Lauderdale, and Dallas). These airports are in very different geographic regions of the United States, yet in each and every airport, certain sights were ubiquitous. Every time I passed a shoe-shine station, it was invariably a white person on the high chair, while a person with darker skin was shining the shoe. Every janitorial cart that passed (and I spent almost three full days in the airport, being passed by many janitorial carts) was not pushed by a white person, but a person with darker skin. Without fail, the people performing the most menial tasks were not white people.

How is it, if the freedom of capitalism does work, that a minority population is so vastly over-represented in menial positions and so vastly under-represented in all the positions above this? It's not an issue of geographic location, because what I saw was the same in the Pacific Northwest as it was Miami as it was in Dallas as it was in Chicago. If this is happening in a nation where the freedom of capitalism is kept more free than anywhere else, what hope is there for the freedom of capitalism?

Some part of the system is promoting this. I don't think that it is inherent in capitalism (although I can imagine it so), which leads me to suspect that the problem is with the base assumptions that we use as the foundation of our system. One of those is that everyone gets to start from an equal point. Capitalism is equitable as long as the people who participate in the system are allowed to start at the same level. This clearly does not happen.

Of course, some might say that the system was never intended to be equitable, but rather to generate the greatest amount of wealth for the largest number of people. Or they might just say that it was intended to generate the greatest amount of wealth. Either way, it is not hard to see how such a system could generate the situation London saw in The People of the Abyss.