street, baskets with vegetables and fruits,
naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still
further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises
a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy
within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being
could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in
comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the
streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the
filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole
window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-
frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or
altogether wanting in this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed,
there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all
directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in
stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid
workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately
huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those
who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds
them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to
resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets,
there are hundreds and thousands of alleys and courts lined with houses
too bad for anyone to live in, who can still spend anything whatsoever
upon a dwelling fit for human beings. Close to the splendid houses of
the rich such a lurking-place of the bitterest poverty may often be
found. So, a short time ago, on the occasion of a coroner's inquest, a
region close to Portman Square, one of the very respectable squares, was
characterised as an abode "of a multitude of Irish demoralised by poverty
and filth." So, too, may be found in streets, such as Long Acre and
others, which, though not fashionable, are yet "respectable," a great
number of cellar dwellings out of which puny children and half-starved,
ragged women emerge into the light of day. In the immediate
neighbourhood of Drury Lane Theatre, the second in London, are some of
the worst streets of the whole metropolis, Charles, King, and Park
Streets, in which the houses are inhabited from cellar to garret
exclusively by poor families. In t