to go through the same routine at twelve o'clock on the
morrow. Aye! and to return on every morrow when soup and rolls are to be
had.

It looks very pitiful, this mass of misery. It seems very comforting to
know that they are fed twice a day with rolls and soup, but after all
the matter wants looking at very carefully, and certain questions must
be asked.

Who are these miserables? How comes it that they are so ready to receive
as a matter of course the doles of food provided for them? Are they
really helped, and is their position really improved by this kind of
charity? I venture to say no! I go farther, and I say very decidedly
that so long as the bulk of these people can get food twice a day, and
secure some kind of shelter at night, they will remain content to be
as they are. I will go still farther and say, that if this provision
becomes permanent the number of the miserables will increase, and the
Old Needle will continue to look down on an ever-growing volume of
poverty and wretchedness.

For after receiving the soup and bread, these nomads disappear into the
streets and by-ways of London, there by hook or crook, by begging or
other means, to secure a few coppers, to pick up scraps of food, and to
return to the Embankment.

I have walked up and down the Embankment, I have looked searchingly
at the people assembled. Some of them I have recognised as old
acquaintances; many of them, I know, have no desire to be other than
what they are. To eat, to sleep, to have no responsibility, to be free
to live an uncontrolled life, are their ambitions; they have no other.
Some of them are young men, only twenty years of age, who have seen
the inside of prison again and again. Some of them are older, who have
tramped the country in the summer time and have been drawn to London by
the attraction of an easy feeding in the winter. Search their ranks! and
you will find very little genuine, unfortunate, self-respecting poverty.
They are what they are, and unless other means are adopted they will,
remain what they are!

And so they will eat the bread and drink the soup; they will come at
twelve o'clock noon; they will come at six o'clock in the evening. They
will sleep where they can, and to-morrow will be as to-day; and the next
day as to-morrow, unless some compulsion is applied to them.

All this is very sad, but I venture to say it is true, and it seems to
be one of the evils almost inseparable from our present life. Prob