if these youngsters had had to fight their way on a
crust, as the veteran said he did, they would be vastly better men for
it. I do not believe it. Hard work, and even disappointment and loss,
are doubtless rich in educational and disciplinary values; but not
that wolfish, soul-crushing fight for insufficient food, not mere
poverty. I have tried them, and I know.

Every day a procession of more or less battered veterans in life's
fight straggles across the floors of the police courts, from waiting-room
to dock and dock to cells. 'How extraordinarily vicious the poor
are!' says some shallow observer. In reality, a very large proportion
of these battered ones are there as drinkers. And, in any case, the
whole of them put together (including the many who require not penal
but medical treatment), supposing they were all viciously criminal--all
violent thieves, say--what a tiny handful they represent of the
poor of London!

The enormous majority of the poor never set foot in a police court.
And yet, for one who knows anything of the conditions in which they
live, how marvellous that is! Most educated people, after all, go
through life, from cradle to grave, without once experiencing any
really strong temptation to break the law of the land. The very poor
are hardly ever free from such temptation; hardly ever free from it. I
know. I, with all the advantages behind me of traditions,
associations, memories, hopes, knowledge, and tastes, to which most
very poor people are strangers, I have felt my fingers itch, my
stomach crave woundily, as I passed along a mean street in which
food-stuffs were exposed outside shop windows; a practice which, upon a
variety of counts, ought long since to have been abolished by law.

Oh, the decency, the restraint, and the enduring law-abidingness of
London's poor, in the face of continuously flaunting plenty, of gross
ostentation! It is the greatest miracle of our time. The comparative
absence of either religion or philosophy among them to-day makes the
spectacle of their docility, to me, far more remarkable than anything
in the history of mediaeval martyrdom. When I come to consider also
the prodigiously irritant influences of modern life in its
legislation, journalism, amusements, swift locomotion, and, not least,
its education for the masses, then I see wireless telegraphy and such
things as trifles, and the abiding self-restraint of the very poor as
our greatest marvel.

VI

After