[The People of the Abyss by Jack London]@TWC D-Link bookThe People of the Abyss CHAPTER III--MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS 5/8
The others, the foreigners and lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get one.
So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford.
It _is_ shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be." I looked at her.
Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers that be are pouring eastward out of London Town.
Bank, factory, hotel, and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, if not in the first generation, surely in the second and third. It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must go.
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