attended, the average expenses would be
lessened, as the working cost for dining fifty is the
same as it would be for dining eighty. But the
poor want incessant hunting up; and though a
benefit like this may be before their very eyes, yet
they will, for the most part, lazily pass it by
unless continually spurred up by those of the
educated classes who are interested in them, and
earnest and unwearied in serving them: as is
Mr. Hicks, the founder and upholder of this
special charity. Had it not been for his personal
superintendence and that of his wife, the scheme
would have lapsed long ago; but they are
people not to be wearied in well-doing, and they
understand the poor.

Indeed no good can be done among them save
by personal superintendence. Public opinion
rules us all more or less; and those who know
the poor, know that the want of a high-class
standard of public opinion among them is one of
the greatest obstacles existing to their improvement.
And nothing gives this so much as personal
contact with the more highly educated.

The object and means of this charity are
given in a very succinct and comprehensive
summary, which we quote.

The Objects of this Charity are:

1. To help the Working Men and Working
Women of St. Pancras to help themselves.

2. To do this only when they are unable to work,
through recent sickness.

3. To give that which will enable them to
regain their strength and return to their occupations.

The means adopted are:

1. To give them a good Dinner, daily, for a week
or two, of the best food procurable.

2. To relieve none but cases recommended by
Subscribers or a Society.

3. To distribute the Dinner Tickets to Hospitals,
Dispensaries, &c., and those who can recommend
cases from personal knowledge.

Indeed, the greatest good is done by giving
tickets to charitable societies and to hospitals.
Mr. Hicks himself gives tickets to the Hospital
for Sick Children, which are not always made
use of, and would keep six places for them at
each bi-weekly dinner if only so many consumers
would be sent. The little creatures often
break down for want of sufficient nourishment
after they have been discharged from the
hospital—-as do their elders—-and it is then when
the charity is so especially valuable.

One or two dinner-tables (adult) of the same
character are to be met with, however,
scattered about London,* which is what is wanted;
the extension of the principle, not the enlargement
of this one particular concern, being what
Mr. Hicks has at heart, and what all who care
for the poor would rejoice to see. The idea of
the sick child's dinner-table is not quite original
to the present founder, inasmuch as Victor
Hugo has for years done the same kind of thing
at his own home in Jersey, where he has fed the
sick and hungry little ones with the great-hearted
generosity one would have expected from the
author of Les Misérables.
* Four, we believe, in all. One in Earl-street,
Lisson-grove, Edgeware-road (1859); another in
Upper Ebury-street, Pimlico (1861); a third in
Poplar-place, Moscow-road, Bayswater (1861); and
this fourth in Woburn-buildings, founded by Mr.
Hicks in the October of 1862. And there is a
sick child's dinner-table in or near Clare-market

It is good that a charity of this nature should
be in the hands of the laity rather than of the
clergy. Often bad men of business, and naturally
inclined to consider undeniable orthodoxy as
equal in value to the claims of hunger, they do
not always make good patrons and guardians of
charities. Wherefore when laymen like Mr.
Hicks come forward to devote themselves heart
and soul and life to the cause of the poor, what
they undertake is almost sure to succeed.
Sectarian prejudices are kept out of sight;
poverty, not orthodoxy, constitutes the claim to
help, and the hands of the Church are strengthened
by the very denial of the management of
secularities. Yet the influence of religious
teaching, even in this one of the most material
of all charities, cannot be too largely desired;
and, as Mr. Hicks says, if some helping
missionary would volunteer to come and read to
the adults when dining, the roast meat would
be none the less savoury, nor the porter less
strengthening. Some missionary, that is, who
would help in the charity itself by sifting cases
and finding out deserving objects, and so doing
good work both inside the house and out.

No, let such charities be kept out of the
hands of the church and the parish authorities
alike. Supported by voluntary contributions,
nanaged by voluntary guardians, true labours
of love in the highest sense, that very element
of pure love, that very essential power of the
free gift, gives a wholesomeness and vitality
which no formal arrangements could give. So
wide spreading is the interest taken in such
things when known, that Mr. Hicks received
one subscription from Madras, in consequence
if a notice of his charity falling into the hands
of an utter stranger to him and to St. Pancras.

Thirteen thousand invalids, poor men and
women, have been dined in that pleasant room
Woburn-buildings during the last three
years, and two thousand seven hundred poor
sick children—-making in all fifteen thousand
seven hundred hungry mouths well filled.
"Need any more be said to prove its usefulness?"
says the little address to the subscribers,
printed on the cover of the book of tickets.
"Suffering from all kinds of diseases (from half
starvation not the least of them), cases are sent
from hospitals, dispensaries, and charitable
insitutions all round this district." It is
established to supply the sick and convalescent
poor who have just left our hospitals and
dispensaries with what they require to fit them for
their work again: namely, a good dinner daily for
a week or two. To those for whom it was
originally intended might be added the aged
and infirm, and others who are past work. All
cases must be recommended by a subscriber or