most cases, not raise two shillings on the lot—and an entire family of ragged, vermin-eaten human beings fill this foul box, which is often only eight or ten feet square.
These people are thieves, cheap prostitutes, hawkers, porters, charwomen, flower-sellers, ragmen—the most pitiful of the irregulars which we suffer, age after age, to live and breed and die beyond the extreme fringe of our industrial army. Sometimes they have nearly as much food to eat as a workhouse-idler: generally not. Drink—the vile mixtures of the cheaper public-house—they have more constantly; and their children are not in their teens before they are familiar with all the vice and crime and brutality which seven out of ten of these rooms breed as naturally as they breed lice or bugs. In winter the doors and windows are sealed, and men, women, and children huddle together or, at times, crouch over a few lighted sticks. And year by year, century by century, babies are ushered into this underworld in edifying abundance, to live its ghastly life until the yellow frame and dull brain are worn out.
Shocking, you will say, but happily rare. Do you know that, according to the best authorities, 50,000 men, women, and children in London alone live in this atmosphere of squalor and brutality and chronic hunger?
Let us pass to the next higher circle of the modern Inferno—the category of casual or very badly paid labour and chronic poverty, the makers of your
