Occasionally, in this Report,
there are scenes described in a circumstantial, Dutch-picture way which
the most vigorous imagination, priding itself on its ingenuity in
depicting wretchedness, would hardly have conceived. Take the following
instance from the evidence of Mr. Holme of Liverpool.

"Some time ago I visited a poor woman in distress, the wife of a
labouring man. She had been confined only a few days, and herself
and infant were lying on straw in a vault through the outer cellar,
with a clay floor, impervious to water. There was no light nor
ventilation in it, and the air was dreadful. _I had to walk on
bricks across the floor to reach her bed-side_, _as the floor itself
was flooded with stagnant water_. This is by no means an
extraordinary case, for I have witnessed scenes equally wretched; and
it is only necessary to go into Crosby-street, Freemason's row, and
many cross streets out of Vauxhall-road, to find hordes of poor
creatures living in cellars, which are almost as bad and offensive as
charnel houses. In Freemason's-row I found, about two years ago, a
court of houses, the floors of which were below the public street,
and the area of the whole court was a floating mass of putrefied
animal and vegetable matter, so dreadfully offensive that I was
obliged to make a precipitate retreat. Yet the whole of the houses
were inhabited!"

Think what materials for every species of comfort and luxury, are
perpetually circulating through Liverpool. If there had not been, for
many a day, a sad neglect of supervision on the part of the employers,
and great improvidence on that of the employed, we should not see the
third part of the working population of such a town immersed in the most
abject wretchedness, and all this wealth passing through and leaving so
little of the comforts of life in the active hands through which it has
passed. It may be said, however, that a considerable part of the
population of Liverpool is immigrant, and Irish. Turn then to
Nottingham, or York, or Preston, it is the same story. Mr. Hawksley, the
engineer, says of Nottingham:

"With few exceptions the houses of Nottingham and its vicinity are
laid out either in narrow streets, or more commonly are built in
confined courts and alleys, the entrance to which is usually through
a tunnel from 30 to 36 inches wide, about 8 feet high, and from 25 to