rookery for the purpose of substituting improvements; and I know only one French writer who would be bold enough to furnish cogent details to any civilised community.  But, for argument’s sake, let me suppose that your “rooks” are transferred from their nests to your model dwellings.  I shall allow you to do all that philanthropy can dictate; I shall grant you the utmost powers that a government can bestow; and I shall give six months for your experiment.  What will be found at the end of that time?  Alas, your fine model dwellings will be in worse condition than the wigwam that the Apache and his squaw inhabit!  Let a colony of “rooks” take possession of a sound, well-fitted building, and it will be found that not even the most stringent daily visitation will prevent utter wreck from being wrought.  The pipes needed for all sanitary purposes will be cut and sold; the handles of doors and the brass-work of taps will be cut away; every scrap of wood-work available for fire-wood will be stolen sooner or later, and the people will relapse steadily into a state of filth and recklessness to be paralleled only among Australian and North American aborigines.  Which of the sentimentalists has ever travelled to America with a few hundreds of Russian and Polish Jews, Saxon peasants, and Irish peasants from the West?  That is the only experience capable of giving an idea of what happens when a fairly-fitted house is handed over to the tender mercies of a selection from the British “residuum.”  I shall be accused of talking the language of despair.  I have never done that.  I should like to see the time come when the poor may no more dwell in hovels like swine, and when a poverty-stricken inhabitant of London may not be brought up with ideas and habits coarser than those of a pig; I merely say that shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way.  They are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars for the use of ferrets.  I grant that the condition of many London streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see how the desolation is caused.  Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been at work everywhere.  The cistern which should supply a building cannot be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe have been chopped away and carried to a marine-store dealer; the landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes’ trouble.  The very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in contented, unspeakable squalor.  No—­something more is required than delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required than sighing sentimentalism, which looks at miserable effects without scrutinising causes.  Let the sentimentalist mark this.  If you transplant a colony of “rooks” into good quarters, you will have another rookery on your hands; if you