set fire to training ships? Why do they break out of
reformatory institutions? Bawling is not necessarily happiness. Yet
fatuous fools are content if only they can hear a good uproar of
bawling.

I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a
starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run
unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more
lively Strand--the ceaseless world pushes past--they play on the
pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their
faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their
hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on
the table to see how they look.

How _can_ people pass without seeing them?

Alere saw them, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket.

The rich folk round about this great Babylon of Misery, where cruel Want
sits on the Seven Hills--make a cartoon of that!--the rich folk who
receive hundreds on the turn of a stock, who go to the Bank of England
on dividend days--how easily the well-oiled doors swing open for
them!--who dwell in ease and luxury at Sydenham, at Norwood, at
Surbiton, at Streatham, at Brighton, at Seven-oaks, wherever there is
pure air, have distinguished themselves lately in the giving of alms,
ordained by the Lord whom they kneel before each Sunday, clad in silk,
scarlet, and fine linen, in their cushioned pews.

They have established Homes for Lost Dogs and Homes for Lost Cats,
neither of which are such nuisances as human beings.

In the dog institution they have set up an apparatus specially designed
by one of the leading scientific men of the age. The dogs that are not
claimed in a certain time, or that have become diseased--like the human
nuisances--are put into this apparatus, into a comfortable sort of
chamber, to gnaw their last bone. By-and-by, a scientific vapour enters
the chamber, and breathing this, the animal falls calmly to death,
painlessly poisoned in peace.

Seven thousand dogs were thus happily chloroformed "into eternity" in
one season. Jubilant congratulations were exchanged at the success of
the apparatus. Better than shooting, drowning, hanging, vivisection, or
starvation!

Let a dog die in peace. Is not this an age of humanity indeed? To sell
all you have and give to the poor was nothing compared to this. We have
progressed since Anno Domini I. We know better how to do it now.

Alere did not see