most unfortunate classes in the London of that time were the poor
chimney-sweeps--little children from four to eight years of age, the
majority of them orphans, the rest bartered or sold by brutal parents.
In order to do their work they had to move up and down by pressing every
joint in their bodies against the hard and often broken surface of the
chimneys; and to prevent their hands and knees from streaming with blood,
the children were rubbed with brine before a fire to harden their flesh.
They were liable to a frightful disorder--the chimneysweeper's cancer,
involving one of the most terrible forms of physical suffering. They
began the day's work at four, three, and even two in the morning; they
were half suffocated by the hot sulphurous air in the flues; often they
would stick in the chimneys and faint; and then if the usual
remedy--straw lighted to bring them round--failed, they were often half
killed, and sometimes killed outright, by the very means used to
extricate them. They lived in low, ill-drained, ill-ventilated, and
noxious rooms and cellars, and often slept upon the soot heaps. They
remained unwashed for weeks, and on Sundays they were generally shut up
together so that their neighbours might not see their miserable
condition. Perhaps the worst part of London when I knew it was Field
Lane, at the bottom of Holborn Hill, now happily improved off the face of
the earth. It was known as "Jack Ketch's Warren," from the fact that the
greater part of the persons hanged at Newgate came from the lanes and
alleys in the vicinity. The disturbances that occurred in these low
quarters were often so great that from forty to fifty constables armed
with cutlasses were marched down, it being often impossible for officers
to act in fewer numbers or disarmed. Some of the houses close beside the
Fleet Ditch were fitted with dark closets, trapdoors, sliding panels, and
other means of escape, while extensive basements served for the purpose
of concealing goods; and in others there were furnaces used by coiners
and stills for the production of excisable spirits. It was here that in
1843 the Ragged School movement in London commenced its wonderful and
praiseworthy career.

Naturally in this connection I must speak of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the
great philanthropist of the Victorian era, a nobleman whose long and
honourable life was spent in the service of man and the fear of God. He
was somewhat narrow-minded, an Evan