lly suitable and humane institution, I told myself a hundred
times, would be a place of compulsory euthanasia--comfortably equipped
lethal cubicles. For some there would be little need of the compulsory
element. Police court officials (especially the court missionaries,
the only philanthropic workers who earned my admiration; and they, of
course, belonged to a properly organised corps, working on salary)
know something of these people; but the big, bright, busy world of
cleanly, educated folk know less of them than they know of prehistoric
fauna.

I have lived under the same roof with men who beat their wives every
week of their lives, and figured in police courts every month of their
lives, when not in prison; with women who, in their lives, had
swallowed up a dozen small homes, through the pawn-shops and in the
form of gin; with men and women who, so degraded were they, were like
as not to kick an infant as they passed if they saw one on the ground;
with human beings who had fallen so very low that on my honour I had
far liefer share a room with a hog than with one of them. Yes, the
close companionship of swine would have been much less distasteful;
and, be it noted, less unwholesome. I have written articles about
Australian wattle blossom, about the bush and the sea--oh, about a
thousand things!--with nothing more than a few inches of filthy lath
and plaster between my aching head and such human wrecks as these.

'Quite brutal!' one has heard some ignorant innocent exclaim, when
accident gave him a fleeting glimpse of a denizen of the under world.
Brutal! I know something of brutes, and something of London's under
world, and I am well assured no brute known to zoology ever reaches
the loathsome depths touched by humanity's lowest dregs. It would
sicken me to recall instances in proof of this; but I have known
scores of them. The beast brutes have no alcohol. That makes a world
of difference. They are actuated mainly by such cleanly motives as
healthy hunger. They have no nameless vices; and they live in
surroundings which make dirt, as dirt exists among humanity's under
world, impossible. In changing my lodging I have fled from neighbours
who, at times, sheltered acquaintances of whom it might literally be
said that you could not walk upon pavement they had trodden without
risk of physical contamination.

Drink! A man occupied a room next to mine, at one time, of which his
mother was the tenant. Somewhere, I was t