t of the main room, there were some
forty adult women, with teachers exclusively of their own sex. The
teachers were of various grades of capacity; but, as all teach without
pay and under circumstances which forbid the idea of any other than
philanthropic or religious attractiveness in the duty, they are all
deserving of praise. The teaching is confined, I believe, to rudimental
instruction in reading and spelling, and to historic, theologic and
moral lessons from the Bible. As the doors are open, and every one who
sees fit comes in, stays so long as he or she pleases, and then goes
out, there is much confusion and bustle at times, but on the whole a
satisfactory degree of order is preserved, and considerable, though very
unequal, progress made by the pupils.

But such faces! such garments! such daguerreotypes of the superlative of
human wretchedness and degradation! These pupils were gathered from
among the outcasts of London--those who have no family ties, no homes,
no education, no religious training, but were born to wander about the
docks, picking up a chance job now and then, but acquiring no skill, no
settled vocation, often compelled to steal or starve, and finally
trained to regard the sheltered, well fed, and respected majority as
their natural oppressors and their natural prey. Of this large class of
vagrants, amounting in this city to thousands, Theft and (for the
females) Harlotry, whenever the cost of a loaf of bread or a night's
lodging could be procured by either, were as matter-of-course resorts
for a livelihood as privateering, campaigning, distilling or (till
recently) slave-trading was to many respected and well-to-do champions
of order and Conservatism throughout Christendom. And the outcasts have
ten times the excuse for their moral blindness and their social misdeeds
that their well-fed competitors in iniquity ever had. They have simply
regarded the world as their oyster and tried to open its hard shells as
they best could, not indicating thereby a special love of oysters but a
craving appetite for food of some kind. It was oyster or nothing with
them. And in the course of life thus forced upon them, the males who
survived the period of infancy may have averaged twenty-five years of
wretched, debased, brutal existence, while the females, of more delicate
frame and subjected to additional evils, have usually died much younger.
But the gallows, the charity hospitals, the prisons, the work-houses
(re