be said by courtesy to
belong to the "working-classes" "Their life is the life of savages, with
vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess. Their food is of
the coarsest description, and their only luxury is drink. It is not easy
to say how they live; the living is picked up, and what is got is
frequently shared; when they cannot find 3d. for their night's lodging,
unless favourably known to the deputy, they are turned out at night into
the street, to return to the common kitchen in the morning. From these
come the battered figures who slouch through the streets, and play the
beggar or the bully, or help to foul the record of the unemployed; these
are the worst class of corner-men, who hang round the doors of public-
houses, the young men who spring forward on any chance to earn a copper,
the ready materials for disorder when occasion serves. They render no
useful service; they create no wealth; more often they destroy it."[3]

Next comes B, a thicker stratum of some 100,000, or 111/2 per cent.,
largely composed of shiftless, broken-down men, widows, deserted women,
and their families, dependent upon casual earnings, less than 18s. per
week, and most of them incapable of regular, effective work. Most of the
social wreckage of city life is deposited in this stratum, which
presents the problem of poverty in its most perplexed and darkest form.
For this class hangs as a burden on the shoulders of the more capable
classes which stand just above it. Mr. Booth writes of it--

"It may not be too much to say that if the whole of class B were swept
out of existence, all the work they do could be done, together with
their own work, by the men, women, and children of classes C and D; that
all they earn and spend might be earned, and could very easily be spent,
by the classes above them; that these classes, and especially class C,
would be immensely better off, while no class, nor any industry, would
suffer in the least." Class C consists of 75,000, or 8 per cent.,
subsisting on intermittent earnings of from 18s. to 21s. for a moderate-
sized family. Low-skilled labourers, poorer artizans, street-sellers,
small shopkeepers, largely constitute this class, the curse of whose
life is not so much low wages as irregularity of employment, and the
moral and physical degradation caused thereby. Above these, forming the
top stratum of "poor," comes a large class, numbering 129,000, or 141/2
per cent., dependent upon small regul