For the making of match-boxes and the sticking on of the labels the
pay is 2-1/2_d_. per gross. Few of us, I think, would care to
manufacture 144 matchboxes for 2-1/2_d_. I learned that it is not
unusual to find little children of four years of age helping their
mothers to make these boxes.

The Slum Sisters attached to the Settlement, who are distinct from the
Maternity Nurses, visit the very poorest and worst neighbourhoods, for
the purpose of helping the sick and afflicted, and incidentally of
cleaning their homes. Also, they find out persons who are about
sixty-nine years of age, and contribute to their maintenance, so as to
save them from being forced to receive poor-law relief, which would
prevent them from obtaining their old-age pensions when they come to
seventy.

Here is an illustration of the sort of case with which these Slum
Sisters have to deal; perhaps, I should say, the easiest sort of case.
An old man and his wife whom they visited, lived in a clean room. The
old woman fell sick, and before she died the Slum Sisters gave her a
bath, which, as these poor people much object to washing, caused all
the neighbours to say that they had killed her. After his wife's
death, the husband, who earned his living by selling laces on London
Bridge, went down in the world, and his room became filthy. The Slum
Sisters told him that they would clean up the place, but he forbade
them to touch the bed, which, he said, was full of mice and beetles.
As he knew that women dread mice and beetles, he thought that this
statement would frighten them. When he was out selling his laces, they
descended upon his room, where the first thing that they did was to
remove the said bed into the yard and burn it, replacing it with
another. On his return, the old man exclaimed: 'Oh, my darlings,
whatever _have_ you been doing?'

They still clean this room once a week.

The general impression left upon my mind, after visiting this place at
Hackney Road and conversing with its guardian angels, is, that in some
of its aspects, if not in all, civilization is a failure. Probably
thoughtful people made the same remark in ancient Rome, and in every
other city since cities were. The truth is, that so soon as its
children desert the land which bore them for the towns, these horrors
follow as surely as the night follows the day.

THE PICCADILLY MIDNIGHT WORK

GREAT TICHFIELD STREET

I visited this place a little before twelve o'clo