Now I do not want to confuse my readers by taking first a bead-roll of proposals, and then a bead-roll of arguments for and against, so I shall deal with each reformer’s idea in the order of its importance.  Before beginning, I must say that I differ from all the purveyors of the cheaper sort of sentiment; I differ from many ladies and gentlemen who talk about abstractions; and I differ most of all from the feather-brained persons who set up as authorities after they have paid flying visits in cabs to ugly neighbourhoods.  When a specialist like Miss Octavia Hill speaks, we hear her with respect; but Miss Hill is not a sentimentalist; she is a keen, cool woman who has put her emotions aside, and who has gone to work in the dark regions in a kind of Napoleonic fashion.  No fine phrases for her—­nothing but fact, fact, fact.  Miss Hill feels quite as keenly as the gushing persons; but she has regulated her feelings according to the environment in which her energies had to be exercised, and she has done more good than all the poetic creatures that ever raked up “cases” or made pretty phrases.  I leave Miss Hill out of my reckoning, and I deal with the others.  My conclusions may seem hard, and even cruel, but they are based on what I believe to be the best kindness, and they are supported by a somewhat varied experience.  I shall waive the charge of cruelty in advance, and proceed to plain downright business.

You want to clear away rookeries and erect decent dwellings in their place?  Good and beautiful!  I sympathise with the intention, and I wish that it could be carried into effect instantly.  Unhappily reforms of that sort cannot by any means be arranged on the instant, and certainly they cannot be arranged so as to suit the case of the Hopeless Poor.  Shall I tell you, dear sentimentalist, that the Hopeless brigade would not accept your kindness if they could?  I shall stagger many people when I say that the Hopeless division like the free abominable life of the rookery, and that any kind of restraint would only send them swarming off to some other centre from which they would have to be dislodged by degrees according to the means and the time of the authorities.  Hard, is it not?  But it is true.  Certain kinds of cultured men like the life which they call “Bohemian.”  The Hopeless class like their peculiar Bohemianism, and they like it with all the gusto and content of their cultured brethren.  Suppose you uproot a circle of rookeries.  The inhabitants are scattered here and there, and they proceed to gain their living by means which may or may not be lawful.  The decent law-abiding citizens who are turned out of house and home during the progress of reform suffer most.  They are not inclined to become predatory animals; and, although they may have been used to live according to a very low human standard, they cannot all at once begin to live merely up to the standard of pigs.  No writer dare tell in our English tongue the consequences of evicting the denizens of a genuine