FROM A DISTANCE
Seated at a continental card-table with a "quite nice", capped and mittened, smiling old lady, he will find the game suddenly suspended. The courteous and restrained smile with which a good Catholic asks a heretic about the outrageous practises of his sect, will beam upon the old lady's face. She will say that she cannot understand how anyone so obviously humane and sympathetic as the particular Londoner before her, can bear to walk the streets of London town, where, at all moments and on all sides, people suddenly drop dead of starvation. She will resume her deal.
Confronted with this particular "View of London" your Londoner can only gasp. He will realise that his amiable hostess has been reading, in her local paper, a quotation from his Registrar General's returns. And, for purposes of refutation, the trouble is that he knows nothing about the figures. He does not feel assured whether, according to the Return, 75, 750, or 7,500 people died of starvation during the past year. He does not know whether "cases of death from exposure accelerated by want" are included. He has a hazy notion that no one in London need die of starvation, seeing that there are workhouses. But as a rule he knows nothing of the workings of Poor Law Relief. He knows so little of his London.
He may even, as a result, have added to his particular picture of the place, the dim and disturbing image of a lank-haired, hollow cheeked, glaring eyed, pale woman,—a Spectre of Starvation with, in the bulge of an old shawl, the suggestion of a naked, frozen baby. He
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