she was to Lebrun for a picture of despair.
" Why," she was asked, " do none of your
children come to school?"—"No money."
—" But you need pay nothing,—only wash
and send them."— " I can't wash them;—no
fire."

We went into a cellar shared by two
families:—the rent of a room or cellar in this
district is commonly two shillings a-week.
One half of this room was occupied by a
woman and four children, who had also a
husband somewhere working for her; her
division contained many bits of furniture
and quite a fairy-land of ornaments upon the
mantelpiece. The other woman was a widow
with a son nineteen years old. They had
nothing but a little deal table and two
broken chairs; but there were hung up against
the wall two coloured pictures in gilt frames,
which her son, she said, had lately given her.
Perhaps they were a birthday gift; certainly,
cheap as they may have been, they were the
fruit of a long course of saving; for the poor
woman, trembling with ill-health, and
supporting her body with both hands upon the
little table, said, that her son was then out
hawking, and that she expected him in every
minute in hope that he might bring home
three-halfpence to get their tea.

Account was made of the earnings of a
whole lane, and they were found to average
threepence farthing a day for the
maintenance of each inhabitant, both great and
small. There was, I think, one in about six
positively disabled by sickness. The dearness
of everything during the last winter had
been preventing hawkers and others from
making their small purchases and sales ; the
consequence was to be seen too plainly in many
a dismantled room. The spring and summer
are for all the harvest time, but some were
already beginning to suspect that " the spring
must have gone by," for their better times
used to begin early in March, and there is
still no sign of them. All were, however,
trusting more or less that, in the summer,
they would be able to recover some of the
ground lost during a winter more severe than
usual. None seemed to have a suspicion of
the fate in store, of the war-prices and
causes of privation that probably will make
for them this whole year one long winter of
distress. It is not only in the dead upon the
battle-field, or among the widows and orphans
of the fallen, that you may see the miseries of
war. Let any one go, five months hence,
among these poor people of St. Philip's,
Shoreditch (that is the right name of this
region of Bethnal Green), when they find that
they have lost not their spring only, but their
summer,—let them be seen fasting under an
autumn sun in their close courts and empty
rooms, starved by hundreds out of life as well
as hope, and he will understand, with a new
force, what is the meaning of a war to the
poor man.

Something I have neglected to say
concerning the dismantled rooms. The absent
furniture and clothing has not been pawned,
it has gone to a receiving-house. The
district is full of miserable people preying
upon misery who lend money on goods under
the guise of taking care of them, and give
no ticket or other surety. It is all made a
matter of faith, and an enormous interest is
charged for such accommodation in defiance
of the law.

And another miserable truth has to be
told. The one vice with which misery is too
familiar is well-known also here; for on the
borders of this wretched land, which they
must give up hope who enter, there is a
palace hung round outside with eight or ten
huge gaslights—inside brilliantly illuminated.
That is the house of the dragon at the gate—
there lives the gin devil.

What is to be done? Private charity must
look on hopelessly when set before an evil so
gigantic. Here is but a little bit of London,
scarcely a quarter of a mile square, we look
at it aghast, but there is other misery around
it and beyond it. What is to be done? So
much drainage and sewerage is to be done, is
very certain. All that can be done is to be
done to change the character of a Bethnal-
Green home. The Society for Improving the
Dwellings of the Poor makes nearly five per
cent, on its rooms for families, though it fails
commercially when taking thought for single
men. The Society professes pure benevolence,
and no care about dividends. Let it abandon
that profession, abide by it certainly as a
guiding idea, but let it take purely commercial
ground before the public, and let its arm.
be strengthened. They who are now paying
from five to seven pounds a-year for a filthy
room or cellar, will be eager enough to pay
the same price for a clean and healthy lodging.
Let model lodging-houses for such
families be multiplied, let them return a
percentage to their shareholders; and since the
society is properly protected by a charter, let
all who would invest a little money wisely
look into its plans. I see the need of this so
strongly that I shall begin to inquire now
very seriously into its affairs, and I exhort
others to do the same, with a view to taking
shares, if they be found a safe and fit investment.

Private and direct charity may relieve
individuals, and console many a private sorrow
in this part of London, but it cannot touch
—such charity to the extent of thousands of
pounds cannot remove—the public evil.
Associations for providing any measure of
relief are checked by the necessity for charters
to protect themselves against the present
unjust laws of partnership.

And, after all, the truth remains, that the
people are crowded together in a stagnant
corner of the world. They are all poor
together; no tradesman or employer living
among them finds them occupation; they
ramble about and toil their lives away