on in a reasonable way.

It is high time, too, that the public understood the difficulties that
attend any effort to lift lodging-house habitues to a higher form of
existence.

I am bold enough to hazard the statement that the number of these
people increases year by year, and that no redemptive effort has had the
slightest effect in checking the continual increase. As Secretary of
the Howard Association, it is my business year by year to make myself
acquainted with the criminal statistics, and all matters connected with
our prisons. These statistics more than confirm my statement, for they
tell us that while drunkenness, brutality, crimes of violence show
a steady decrease, vagabondage, sleeping out, begging, etc., show a
continual increase as years roll by.

Of course many of them appear again and again in the prison statistics,
nevertheless they form a great and terrible army, whose increase bodes
ill for dear and fair old England.

Like birds they are migratory, but they pour no sweetness on the morning
or evening air. Like locusts they leave a blight behind.

Like famished wolves when winter draws near they seek the habitations of
men. Food they must have! There is corn in Egypt!

When gentle spring returns, then heigho! for the country lanes, villages
and provincial towns, and as they move from place to place they leave
their trail behind them.

And what a trail it is! ask the governors of our local prisons, ask the
guardians of any country districts, ask the farmers, aye, and ask the
timid women and pretty children, and, my word for it, they will be able
to tell you much of these strange beings that returning summer brings
unfailingly before them. Their lodging is sometimes the cold hard
ground, or the haystack, or perchance, if in luck, an outbuilding.

The prisons are their sanatoria, the workhouses their homes of rest, and
the casual ward their temporary conveniences. But always before them
is one objective, for a common lodging-house is open to them, and its
hypnotism draws them on and on.

So on they go, procreating as they go. Carrying desolation with them,
leaving desolation behind them. The endurance of these people--I suppose
they must be called people--is marvellous and their rate of progression
is sometimes astonishing; weary and footsore, maimed, halt or blind they
get over the ground at a good uniform pace.

Look at that strange being that has just passed us as we sat on the bank
of a cou