correct deductions; and it is, after all, only men and women of the world whose practical sympathy is likely to be enlisted by a revelation of the truth about the poor of great cities.

Come with me down this court, where at eleven o'clock in the morning a dead silence reigns. Every house is tenanted, but the blinds of the windows are down and the doors are shut. Blinds and doors! Yes, these luxuries are visible here. This is an aristocratic street, and the rents are paid regularly. There is no grinding poverty, no starvation here, and no large families to drag at the bread-winner. There is hardly any child-life here at all, for the men are thieves and highway cheats, and the women are of the class which has furnished the companions of such men from the earliest annals of roguedom.

The colony sleeps though the sun is high. The day with them is the idle time, and they reap their harvest in the hours of darkness. Later in the day, towards two o'clock, there will be signs of life; oaths and shouts will issue from the now silent rooms, and there will be fierce wrangles and fights over the division of ill-gotten gains. The spirit of murder hovers over this spot, for life is held of little account. There is a Bill Sikes and Nancy in scores of these tenements, and the brutal blow is ever the accompaniment of the brutal oath.

These people, remember, rub elbows with the honest labouring poor; their lives are no mystery to the boys and girls in the neighbourhood; the little girls often fetch Nancy's gin, and stand in a gaping crowd while Nancy and Bill exchange compliments on the doorstep, drawn from the well of Saxon, impure and utterly defiled. The little boys look up half with awe and half with admiration at the burly Sikes with his flash style, and delight in gossip concerning his talents as a 'crib-cracker,' and his adventures as a pickpocket: The poor—the honest poor—have been driven by the working of the Artizans' Dwellings Acts, and the clearance of rookery after rookery, to come and herd with thieves and wantons, to bring up their children in the last Alsatias, where lawlessness and violence still reign supreme.

The constant association of the poor and the criminal class has deadened in the former nearly all sense of right and wrong. In the words of one of them, 'they can't afford to be particular about their choice of neighbours.' I was but the other day in a room in this district occupied by a widow woman, her daughters of seventeen and sixteen, her sons of fourteen and thirteen, and two younger children. Her wretched apartment was on the street level, and behind it was the common yard of the tenement. In this yard the previous night a drunken sailor had been desperately maltreated, and left for dead. I asked the woman if she had not heard the noise, and why she didn't interfere. 'Heard it?' was the reply; 'well, we ain't deaf, but they're a rum lot in this here house, and we're used to rows. There ain't a night passes as there ain't a fight in the passage or a drunken row; but why should I interfere?'Taint no business of mine.' As a matter of fact, this woman, her grown-up daughters, and her boys must have lain in that room night after night, hearing the most obscene language, having a perfect knowledge of the proceedings of the vilest and most depraved of profligate men and women forced upon them, hearing cries of murder and the sound of blows, knowing that almost every crime in the Decalogue was being committed in that awful back yard on which that broken casement looked, and yet not one of them had ever dreamed of stirring hand or foot. They were saturated with the spirit of the place, and though they were respectable people themselves, they saw nothing criminal in the behaviour of their neighbours.

For this room, with its advantages, the widow paid four and sixpence a week; the walls were mildewed and streaming with damp; the boards as you trod upon them made the slushing noise of a plank spread across a mud puddle in a brickfield; foul within and foul without, these people paid the rent of it gladly, and perhaps thanked God for the luck of having it. Rooms for the poor earning precarious livelihoods are too hard to get and too much in demand now for a widow woman to give up one just because of the trifling inconvenience of overhearing a few outrages and murders.

One word more on this shady subject and we will get out into the light again. I have spoken of the familiarity of the children of the poor with all manner of wickedness and crime. Of all the evils arising from this one-room system there is perhaps none greater than the utter destruction of innocence in the young. A moment's thought will enable the reader to appreciate the evils of it. But if it is bad in the case of a respectable family, how much more terrible is it when the children are familiarized with actual immorality!

Wait outside while we knock at this door.

Knock, knock!—No answer!

Knock, knock, knock!

A child's voice answers, 'What is it?'

We give the answer—the answer which has been our 'open, sesame' everywhere—and after a pause a woman opens a door a little and asks us to wait a moment. Presently we are admitted. A woman pleasing looking and with a certain refinement in her features holds the door open for us. She has evidently made a hurried toilet and put on an ulster over her night attire. She has also put a brass chain and locket round her neck. There is a little rouge left on her cheeks and a little of the burnt hairpin colour left under her eyes from overnight. At the table having their breakfast are two neat and clean little girls of seven and eight.

They rise and curtsey as we enter. We ask them a few questions, and they answer intelligently—they are at the Board School and are making admirable progress—charming children, interesting and well-behaved in every way. They have a perfect knowledge of good and evil—one of them has taken a Scripture prize—and yet these two charming and intelligent little girls live in that room night and day with their mother, and this is the den to which she snares her dissolute prey.

I would gladly have passed over this scene in silence, but it is one part of the question which directly bears on the theory of State interference. It is by shutting our eyes to evils that we allow them to continue unreformed so long. I maintain that such cases as these are fit ones for legislative protection. The State should have the power of rescuing its future citizens from such surroundings, and the law which protects young children from physical hurt should also be so framed as to shield them from moral destruction.

The worst effect of the present system of Packing the Poor is the moral destruction of the next generation.

Whatever it costs us to remedy the disease we shall gain in decreased crime and wickedness. It is better even that the ratepayers should bear a portion of the burthen of new homes for the respectable poor than that they should have to pay twice as much in the long-run for prisons, lunatic asylums, and workhouses.

Enough for the present of the criminal classes. Let us see some of the poor people who earn an honest living—well, 'living,' perhaps, is hardly the word—let us say, who can earn enough to pay their rent and keep body and soul together.

Here is a quaint scene, to begin with. When we open the door we start back half choked. The air is full of floating fluff, and some of it gets into our mouths and half chokes us. When we've coughed and wheezed a little we look about us and gradually take in the situation.

The room is about eight feet square. Seated on the floor is a white fairy—a dark-eyed girl who looks as though she had stepped straight off a twelfth cake. Her hair is powdered all over a la Pompadour, and the effect is bizarre. Seated beside her is an older woman, and she is white and twelfth-cakey too. Alas! their occupation is prosaic to a degree. They are simply pulling rabbit-skins—that is to say, they are pulling away all the loose fluff and