striking a contrast, so wide a chasm, between rich and poor as in
these United States of America. There is no man in the whole of
Great Britain and Ireland who is as wealthy as one of some
half-a-dozen men who could be named in this country; and there are
few there who could be poorer than some that could be found in this
country. It is true that there is a larger number of the extremely
poor in Great Britain and Ireland than there is in this country,
but it is not true that there is any more desperate poverty in any
civilized country than ours; and it is unquestionably not true that
there is any greater mass of riches concentrated in a few hands in
any country than this."

This for America. For England the tale is much the same. "The Bitter Cry
of Outcast London," with its passionate demand that the rich open their
eyes to see the misery, degradation, and want seething in London slums,
is but another putting of the words of the serious, scientific observer
of facts, Huxley himself, who has described an East End parish in which
he spent some of his earliest years. Over that parish, he says, might
have been written Dante's inscription over the entrance to the Inferno:
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here." After speaking of its physical
misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says
that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of
seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation;
and he writes:--

"I assure you I found nothing worse, nothing more degrading,
nothing so hopeless, nothing nearly so intolerably dull and
miserable as the life I left behind me in the East End of London.
Were the alternative presented to me, I would deliberately prefer
the life of the savage to that of those people in Christian London.
Nothing would please me better--not even to discover a new
truth--than to contribute toward the bettering of that state of
things which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will
tend to become worse, and to create something worse than
savagery,--a great Serbonian bog, which in the long run will
swallow up the surface crust of civilization."

In a year and more of continuous observation and study of working
conditions in England and on the Continent, some of which will find
place later, my own conclusion was the same. The yo