But in spite of all this, they who have some kind of a shelter are fortunate, fortunate in comparison with the utterly homeless.  In London fifty thousand human beings get up every morning, not knowing where they are to lay their heads at night.  The luckiest of this multitude, those who succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a lodging-house, such as abound in every great city, where they find a bed.  But what a bed!  These houses are filled with beds from cellar to garret, four, five, six beds in a room; as many as can be crowded in.  Into every bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as many as can be packed in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as they come, indiscriminately.  Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to record.  And those who cannot pay for such a refuge?  They sleep where they find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and the owners leave them undisturbed.  A few individuals find their way to the refuges which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others sleep on the benches in the parks close under the windows of Queen Victoria.  Let us hear the London Times: 

“It appears from the report of the proceedings at Marlborough Street Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by the trees and a few hollows of the embankment.  Of these, the majority are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.

“This is truly horrible!  Poor there must be everywhere.  Indigence will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great and luxurious city.  Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much suffering—­much that offends the eye—­much that lurks unseen.

“But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh the regal grandeur of St. James, close on the palatial splendour of Bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters, in a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has refrained from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems, as it were, dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth, that there want, and famine, and disease, and vice should stalk in all their kindred horrors, consuming body by body, soul, by soul!

“It is indeed a monstrous state of things!  Enjoyment the most absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man’s