you earn
six shillings per week? How very surprising! And the landlord takes
four shillings for your one room? How very mean! And you have--let me
see--four from six leaves two--yes--you have two shillings a week to
keep you and your three children? How charmingly shocking!" The honest
poor go out to work; the wastrels stay at home and invent tales of
woe; then, when the dusk falls on the foul court and all the
sentimentalists have gone home to dinner, the woe-stricken tellers of
harrowing tales creep out to the grimy little public-house at the top
of the row; they spend the gifts of the sentimentalist; and, when the
landlord draws out his brimming tills at midnight, he blesses the kind
people who help to earn a snug income for him. I have seen forty-eight
drunken people come out of a tavern between half-past eleven and
half-past twelve in one night during the time when sentiment ran mad;
there never were such roaring times for lazy and dissolute scoundrels;
and nearly all the money given by the sentimentalists was spent in
sowing crops of liver complaint or _delirium tremens_, and in filling
the workhouses and the police-cells. Then the fit of charity died out;
the clergyman and the "sisters" went on as usual in their sacredly
secret fashion until a new outburst came. It seems strange to talk of
Charity "raging"--it reminds us of Mr. Mantalini's savage lamb--but I
can use no other word but "rage" to express these frantic gushes of
affection for the poor. During one October month I carefully preserved
and collated all the suggestions which were so liberally put forth in
various London and provincial newspapers; and I observed that
something like four hundred of these suggestions resolve themselves
into a very few definite classes. The most sensible of these follow
the lines laid down by Charles Dickens, and the writers say, "If you
do not want the poor to behave like hogs, why do you house them like
hogs? Clear away the rookeries; buy up the sites; pay reasonable
compensation to those now interested in the miserable buildings, and
then erect decent dwellings."

Now I do not want to confuse my readers by taking first a bead-roll of
proposals, and then a bead-roll of arguments for and against, so I
shall deal with each reformer's idea in the order of its importance.
Before beginning, I must say that I differ from all the purveyors of
the cheaper sort of sentiment; I differ from many ladies and gentlemen
who talk about a