every year.  All this was carried on by the riverside people.  But, to make robbery successful, there must be accomplices, receiving-houses, fences, a way to dispose of the goods.  In this case the thieves had as their accomplices the whole of the population of the quarter where they lived.  All the public-houses were secret markets attended by grocers and other tradesmen where the booty was sold by auction, and, to escape detection, fictitious bills and accounts were given and received.  The thieves were known among themselves by fancy names, which at once indicated the special line of each and showed the popularity of the calling; they were bold pirates, night plunderers, light horsemen, heavy horsemen, mud-larks, game lightermen, scuffle-hunters and gangsmen.  Their thefts enabled them to live in the coarse profusion of meat and drink, which was all they wanted; yet they were always poor because their plunder was knocked down for so little; they saved nothing; and they were always egged on to new robberies by the men who sold them drinks, by the women who took their money from them, and by the honest merchants who attended the secret markets.

I dwell upon the past because the present is its natural legacy.  When you read of the efforts now being made to raise the living, or at least to prevent them from sinking any lower, remember that they are what the dead made them.  We inherit more than the wealth of our ancestors; we inherit the consequences of their misdeeds.  It is a most expensive thing to suffer the people to drop and sink; it is a sad burden which we lay upon posterity if we do not continually spend our utmost in lifting them up.  Why, we have been the best part of two thousand years in recovering the civilization which fell to pieces when the Roman Empire decayed.  We have not been fifty years in dragging up the very poor whom we neglected and left to themselves, the gallows, the cat, and the press-gang only a hundred years ago.  And how slow, how slow and sometimes hopeless, is the work!

The establishment of river police and the construction of docks have cleared the river of all this gentry.  Ships now enter the docks; there discharge and receive; the labourers can carry away nothing through the dock-gates.  No apron allows a bag to be hidden; policemen stand at the gates to search the men; the old game is gone—­what is left is a surviving spirit of lawlessness; the herding together; the hand-to-mouth life; the love of drink as the chief attainable pleasure; the absence of conscience and responsibility; and the old brutality.

What the riverside then was may be learned by a small piece of Rotherhithe in which the old things still linger.  Small repairing-docks, each capable of holding one vessel, are dotted along the street; to each are its great dock-gates, keeping out the high tide, and the quays and the shops and the caretaker’s lodge; the ship lies in the dock shored up by timbers on either side, and the workmen are hammering, caulking,