y day are sapping the healthier family
affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all
the philanthropists in the world.

It is easy indeed to resolve on "helping" the poor; but it is far less
easy to see clearly how we can help them, what is real aid, and what is
mere degradation. I know few books where any one who is soberly facing
questions like these can find more help than in the "Letters" of Edward
Denison. Broken and scattered as his hints necessarily appear, the main
lines along which his thought moves are plain enough. He would
discriminate between temporary, and chronic distress, between the
poverty caused by a sudden revolution of trade and permanent destitution
such as that of Bethnal Green. The first requires exceptional treatment;
the second a rigid and universal administration of the Poor Laws. "Bring
back the Poor Law," he repeats again and again, "to the spirit of its
institution; organize a sufficiently elastic labour test, without which
no outdoor relief to be given; make the few alterations which altered
times demand, and impose every possible discouragement on private
benevolence." The true cure for pauperism lies in the growth of thrift
among the poor. "I am not drawing the least upon my imagination when I
say that a young man of twenty could in five years, even as a
dock-labourer, which is much the lowest employment and least well paid
there is, save about L20. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within the
reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of the tree; but if it
were of anything like common occurrence the destitution and disease of
this life would be within manageable limits."

I know that words like these are in striking contrast with the usual
public opinion on the subject, as well as with the mere screeching over
poverty in which sentimentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it
is fair to say that they entirely coincide with my own experience. The
sight which struck me most in Stepney was one which met my eyes when I
plunged by sheer accident into the back-yard of a jobbing carpenter, and
came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine flowers inside it. The
man had built it with his own hands and his own savings; and the sight
of it had so told on his next-door neighbour--a cobbler, if I remember
rightly--as to induce him to leave off drinking, and build a rival
greenhouse with savings of his own. Both had become zealous florists,
and thrifty, respec