Perhaps comfortable, satisfied readers may be startled, or even offended, if I say that there are young creatures in our great cities who rarely see even the light of day, save when the beams are filtered through the reek of a court; and these same infants resemble the black fellows of Western Australia or the Troglodytes of Africa in general intelligence.  I have little heart to speak of the parents who are answerable for such horrors of crass neglect and cruelty.  By laying a set of dry police reports before any sensitive person I could make that person shudder without adding a word of rhetoric; for it would be seen that the popular picture of a fiend represents rather a mild and harmless entity if we compare it with the foul-souled human beings who dwell in our benighted places.  What is to be done?  It is best to grapple swiftly with an ugly question; and I do not hesitate to attack deliberately one of the most delicate puzzles that ever came before the world.  Wise emotionless men may say, and do say, “Are you going to relieve male and female idlers and drunkards of all anxiety regarding their offspring?  Do you mean to discourage the honest but poverty-stricken parents who do their best for their children?  What kind of world will you make for us all if you give your aid to the worst and neglect the good folk?” Those are very awkward questions, and I can answer them only by a sort of expedient which must not be mistaken for intellectual conjuring; I drop ordinary logic and theories of probability and go at once to facts.  At first sight it seems like rank folly for any man or body of men to take charge of a child which has been neglected by shameless parents; but, on the other hand, let us consider our own self-interest, and leave sentiment alone for a while.  We cannot put the benighted starvelings into a lethal chamber and dispose of their brief lives in that fashion; we are bound to maintain them in some way or other—­and the ratepayers of St. George’s-in-the-East know to some trifling extent what that means.  If the waifs grow up to be predatory animals, we must maintain them first of all in reformatories, and afterwards, at intervals during their lives, in prisons.  If they grow up without shaking off the terrible mental darkness of their starveling childhood, we must provide for them in asylums.  A thoroughly neglected waif costs this happy country something like fifteen pounds per year for the term of his natural life.  Very good.  At this point some hard-headed person says, “What about the workhouses?” This brings us face to face with another astounding problem to solve which at all satisfactorily requires no little research and thought.  I know that there are good workhouses; but I happen to know that there are also bad ones.  In many a ship and fishing-vessel fine fellows may be met with who were sent out early from workhouse-schools and wrought their way onward until they became brave and useful seamen; there are also many industrious