austion. Scanty food and
hard labour are in their way, if not exactly moralists, a tolerably good
police.

There are no others at Wodgate to preach or to control. It is not that
the people are immoral, for immorality implies some forethought; or
ignorant, for ignorance is relative; but they are animals; unconscious;
their minds a blank; and their worst actions only the impulse of a gross
or savage instinct. There are many in this town who are ignorant of
their very names; very few who can spell them. It is rare that you meet
with a young person who knows his own age; rarer to find the boy who
has seen a book, or the girl who has seen a flower. Ask them the name of
their sovereign, and they will give you an unmeaning stare; ask them the
name of their religion, and they will laugh: who rules them on earth, or
who can save them in heaven, are alike mysteries to them.

Such was the population with whom Morley was about to mingle. Wodgate
had the appearance of a vast squalid suburb. As you advanced, leaving
behind you long lines of little dingy tenements, with infants lying
about the road, you expected every moment to emerge into some streets
and encounter buildings bearing some correspondence in their size and
comfort to the considerable population swarming and busied around you.
Nothing of the kind. There were no public buildings of any sort; no
churches, chapels, town-hall, institute, theatre; and the principal
streets in the heart of the town in which were situate the coarse and
grimy shops, though formed by houses of a greater elevation than the
preceding, were equally narrow and if possible more dirty. At every
fourth or fifth house, alleys seldom above a yard wide and streaming
with filth, opened out of the street. These were crowded with dwellings
of various size, while from the principal court often branched out a
number of smaller alleys or rather narrow passages, than which nothing
can be conceived more close and squalid and obscure. Here during the
days of business, the sound of the hammer and the file never ceased,
amid gutters of abomination and piles of foulness and stagnant pools
of filth; reservoirs of leprosy and plague, whose exhalations were
sufficient to taint the atmosphere of the whole kingdom and fill the
country with fever and pestilence.

A lank and haggard youth, ricketty and smoke-dried, and black with his
craft, was sitting on the threshold of a miserable hovel and working at
the file. Behind