g his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of
cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
here the day through.'"

The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets
of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work--these might save
the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
no