Jew and Gentile together in a new comradeship that amazed the East End.
Here were groups representing the thrifty, hard-working London Jew of
the second generation,--small masters for the most part, pale with the
confinement and "drive" of the workshop,--men who are expelling and
conquering the Gentile East Ender, because their inherited passion for
business is not neutralised by any of the common English passions for
spending--above all by the passion for drink. Here, too, were men of a
far lower type and grade--the waste and refuse of the vast industrial
mill. Tressady knew a good many of them by sight--sullen, quick-eyed
folk, who buy their "greeners" at the docks, and work them day and night
at any time of pressure; whose workshops are still flaring at two
o'clock in the morning, and alive again by the winter dawn; who fight
and flout the law by a hundred arts, and yet, brutal and shifty as many
of them are, have a curious way of winning the Gentile inspector's
sympathy, even while he fines and harasses them, so clearly are they and
their "hands" alike the victims of a huge world-struggle that does but
toss them on its surge.

These gentry, however, were hard hit by more than one clause of the
Maxwell Bill, and they were here to-night to protest, as they had been
already protesting at many meetings, large and small, all over the East
End. And they had their slaves with them,--ragged, hollow-eyed creatures,
newly arrived from Russian Poland, Austria, or Romania, and ready to
shout or howl in Yiddish as they were told,--men whose strange faces and
eyes under their matted shocks of black or reddish hair suggested every
here and there the typical history and tragic destiny of the race which,
in other parts of the crowd, was seen under its softer and more
cosmopolitan aspects.

As the two men neared the door of the school, where the press was