no man thinks fit for his
horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a
month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to
face with hunger and pauperism . . . But below this normal state of
the average workman in town and country, there is found the great band
of destitute outcasts--the camp followers of the army of industry--at
least one-tenth the whole proletarian population, whose normal
condition is one of sickening wretchedness. If this is to be the
permanent arrangement of modern society, civilization must be held to
bring a curse on the great majority of mankind.

Ninety per cent.! The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford Brooke,
after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself compelled to
multiply it by half a million. Here it is:-

I often used to meet, when I was curate at Kensington, families
drifting into London along the Hammersmith Road. One day there came
along a labourer and his wife, his son and two daughters. Their
family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country, and
managed, with the help of the common-land and their labour, to get on.
But the time came when the common was encroached upon, and their
labour was not needed on the estate, and they were quietly turned out
of their cottage. Where should they go? Of course to London, where
work was thought to be plentiful. They had a little savings, and they
thought they could get two decent rooms to live in. But the
inexorable land question met them in London. They tried the decent
courts for lodgings, and found that two rooms would cost ten shillings
a week. Food was dear and bad, water was bad, and in a short time
their health suffered. Work was hard to get, and its wage was so low
that they were soon in debt. They became more ill and more despairing
with the poisonous surroundings, the darkness, and the long hours of
work; and they were driven forth to seek a cheaper lodging. They
found it in a court I knew well--a hotbed of crime and nameless
horrors. In this they got a single room at a cruel rent, and work was
more difficult for them to get now, as they came from a place of such
bad repute, and they fell into the hands of those who sweat the last
drop out of man and woman and child, for wages which are the food only
of despair. And the darkness and the dirt, the bad food and the