all the burden of a child unallowed by law.  In another lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their overcrowded beds ‘the mitherless bairns.’  In yet another a woman, shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; “I am dying of cancer of the womb,” she said, with that pathetic resignation to the inevitable so common among the poor.  I sat chatting for a few minutes.  ‘Come again, deary,’ she said as I rose to go; ’it’s gey dull sitting here the day through.’”

The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was closed with the following:  “Passing out of the slums into the streets of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question seemed to ring in my ears, ’Is there no remedy?  Must there always be rich and poor?’ Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow.  Not so do I believe.  I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by knowledge and by social change.  I admit that for many of these adult dwellers in the slums there is no hope.  Poor victims of a civilisation that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for them individually there is, alas! no salvation.  But for their children, yes!  Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work—­these might save the young and prepare them for happy life.  But they are being left to grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects.  The scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but elementary, as little as possible is doled out.  Yet these children have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of crime, a life to be made or marred.  We shower money on generals and on nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.  We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their self-respect.  With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince’s palace for him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse to ‘pauperise’ the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may live—­not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which gives a yearly profit to a speculator.