for more observant and sympathetic visitors have been there before you, and they told London long ago, as far as London was willing to hear, how the majority of its citizens live. Mr. Booth’s book, Life and Labour in London, had better be suppressed when its work is done, lest the men and women of a more humane age learn too much about us; also Mr. Rowntree’s book, which shows this same fetid poverty lying at the feet of a superb minster, the symbol of ages of ecclesiastical wealth and power; and many other books. Let me summarise the relevant record of the natural history of London.
We may begin with the lowest depth, with life as it is lived in some of the streets which still linger about Covent Garden, and in east and west and south. We are beginning to see the grim humour of tolerating the existence of these hotbeds of corruption under the very shadow of our marble palaces of justice and our marble hotels for millionaires, and we are destroying them; but the life remains still in sufficient quantity to fill a large town. In tenements of this order fifteen rooms out of twenty are indescribably filthy. Legions of bugs lurk by day behind the faded rags of ancient wallpaper or in the crevices of the unwashed floor, or even venture forth as securely as if they were conscious of free citizenship in these places. The “windows” are a rough mosaic of dirty glass and roughly plastered paper. The ceiling is pale black, the floor filthy. A table, one or two dilapidated chairs, a kind of bed—the “landlord” would, in
