yards of pipe
have been chopped away and carried to a marine-store dealer; the
landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly
countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes' trouble. The
very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in
contented, unspeakable squalor. No--something more is required than
delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than
ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required
than sighing sentimentalism, which looks at miserable effects without
scrutinising causes. Let the sentimentalist mark this. If you
transplant a colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have
another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into
reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes
fit for brutes and for brutes alone. Bricks and mortar and whitewash
will not change the nature of human vermin; phrases about beauty and
duty and loveliness will not affect the maker of slums, any more than
perfumes or pretty colours would affect the rats that squirm under the
foundations of the city. Does the sentimentalist imagine that the
brick-and-mortar structures about which he wails were always centres
of festering ugliness? If he has that fancy, let him take a glance at
some of the quaint old houses of Southwark. They were clean and
beautiful in their day, but the healthy human plant can no longer
flourish in them, and the weed creeps in, the crawling parasite
befouls their walls, and the structures which were lovely when
Chaucer's pilgrims started from the "Tabard" are abominable now. If
English folk of gentle and cleanly breeding had lived on in those
ancient places, they would have been wholesome and sound like many
another house erected in days gone by; but the weed gradually took
root, and now the ugliest dens in London are found in the places where
knights and trim clerks and gracious dames once lived. In the face of
all these things, how strangely unwise it is to fancy that ever the
Forlorn Army can be saved by bricks and mortar!

Education? Ah, there comes a pinch--and a very severe pinch it is!
About five or six years since some of the most important thoroughfares
in London, Liverpool, and many great towns have been rendered totally
impassable by the savage proceedings of gangs of young roughs. Certain
districts in Liverpool could not be traversed after dark, and the
reason was simply this--any man o