Let us investigate some of the slums in their order.  London comes first, and in London the famous rookery of St. Giles which is now, at last, about to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets.  St. Giles is in the midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad, splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles about, in the immediate neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar Square and the Strand.  It is a disorderly collection of tall, three or four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that, here, people of the working-class only are to be seen.  A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers’ stalls, arises a horrible smell.  The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them.  But all this is nothing in comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description.  Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves’ quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal.  Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools.  Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum.  In the immense tangle of streets, there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever upon a dwelling fit for human beings.  Close to the splendid houses of the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be found.  So, a short time ago, on the occasion of a coroner’s inquest, a region close to Portman Square, one of the very respectable squares, was characterised as an abode “of a multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty and filth.”  So, too, may be found in streets, such as Long Acre and others, which, though not fashionable, are yet “respectable,” a great number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved, ragged women emerge into the light of day.  In the immediate neighbourhood