There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house.  From the city’s cathedral to every point of the compass, except the west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled fields maturing for development.  They form by far the larger part of an Empire’s capital.  Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough, as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State.  Out of half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey, the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind.  Each possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate smell.  Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and well-educated people, passing underground or overhead.  Yet to nearly all of us they remain strange and almost untrodden.  We do not think of them when we think of London.  Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul.  Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs.  Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants.  To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.

At elections, even politicians remember their existence.  From time to time a philanthropist goes down there to share God’s good gifts with his poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or painted boards.  From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or Timbuctoo.  When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter’s den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe?  Do we not always get one or other of the lot?  To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to be the subject of a tale.  You may not bring an indictment against a whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million of our fellow-citizens.  Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what filthy lie you please.

About once in a generation some “Bitter Cry” pierces through custom, and the lives of “the poor” become a subject for polite conversation and amateur solicitude.  For three months, or even for six, that subject appears as the intellectual “roti” at dinner-tables; then it is found a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings.  It is almost time now that the poor came up again,