rdinary decency are utterly neglected? On the
contrary, all who are more intimately acquainted with the condition of
the inhabitants will testify to the high degree which disease,
wretchedness, and demoralisation have here reached. Society in such
districts has sunk to a level indescribably low and hopeless. The
houses of the poor are generally filthy, and are evidently never
cleansed. They consist in most cases of a single room which, while
subject to the worst ventilation, is yet usually kept cold by the
broken and badly fitting windows, and is sometimes damp and partly
below ground level, always badly furnished and thoroughly
uncomfortable, a straw-heap often serving the whole family for a bed,
upon which men and women, young and old, sleep in revolting confusion.
Water can be had only from the public pumps, and the difficulty of
obtaining it naturally fosters all possible filth."

In the other great seaport towns the prospect is no better. Liverpool,
with all its commerce, wealth, and grandeur yet treats its workers with
the same barbarity. A full fifth of the population, more than 45,000
human beings, live in narrow, dark, damp, badly-ventilated cellar
dwellings, of which there are 7,862 in the city. Besides these cellar
dwellings there are 2,270 courts, small spaces built up on all four sides
and having but one entrance, a narrow, covered passage-way, the whole
ordinarily very dirty and inhabited exclusively by proletarians. Of such
courts we shall have more to say when we come to Manchester. In Bristol,
on one occasion, 2,800 families were visited, of whom 46 per cent.
occupied but one room each.

Precisely the same state of things prevails in the factory towns. In
Nottingham there are in all 11,000 houses, of which between 7,000 and
8,000 are built back to back with a rear parti-wall so that no through
ventilation is possible, while a single privy usually serves for several
houses. During an investigation made a short time since, many rows of
houses were found to have been built over shallow drains covered only by
the boards of the ground floor. In Leicester, Derby, and Sheffield, it
is no better. Of Birmingham, the article above cited from the _Artisan_
states:

"In the older quarters of the city there are many bad districts,
filthy and neglected, full of stagnant pools and heaps of refuse.
Courts are very numerous in Birmingham, reaching two thousa