able specialists. Lady
So-and-so, who advocated this panacea, found herself bitterly opposed by
Sir So-and-so, who wanted all sufferers to be made to take his nostrum
in his special way. Then sometimes poor Lady So-and-so would throw up
her panacea in a huff, and concentrate her energies upon the work of
some society for converting Jews, who did not want to be converted, or
for supplying red flannel petticoats for South Sea Island girls, who
infinitely preferred cotton shifts and floral wreaths. Even these futile
charities were permitted to overlap one another to a bewilderingly
wasteful extent.

But the two saddest aspects of the whole gigantic muddle so far as
charitable work went, were undoubtedly these: The fact that much of it
went to produce a class of men and women who would not do any kind of
work because they found that by judicious sponging they could live and
obtain alcohol and tobacco in idleness; and the fact that where
charitable endeavour infringed upon vested interests, licit or illicit,
it was savagely opposed by the persons interested.

The discipline of the national schools was slack, intermittent, and of
short reach. There was positively no duty to the State which a youth was
bound to observe. Broadly, it might be said that at that time discipline
simply did not enter at all into the life of the poor of the towns, and
charity of every conceivable and inconceivable kind did enter into it at
every turn.

The police service was excellent and crime exceedingly difficult of
accomplishment. The inevitable result was the evolution in the towns of
a class of men and women, but more especially of men, who, though
compact of criminal instincts of every kind, yet committed no offence
against criminal law. They committed nothing. They simply lived,
drinking to excess when possible, determined upon one point only: that
they never would do anything which could possibly be called work. It is
obvious that among such people the sense of duty either to themselves,
to each other, or to the State, was merely non-existent.

London had long since earned the reputation of being the most charitable
city in the world. Its share in the production of an immense loafer
class formed one sad aspect of London's charity when I first came to
know the city. Another was the opposition of vested interests--the
opposition of the individual to the welfare of the mass. One found it
everywhere. An instance I call to mind (it happened t