f great cunning. The
girls probably immoral, the boys feckless and drunken.

We have to pay for our neglect; we have no pity upon epileptics. He and
his children have no pity for us!

CHAPTER VII. WOMEN IN THE UNDERWORLD

The women of the underworld may be divided into three great classes.
Those who by reason of their habits or mental peculiarities prefer to
live homeless lives. Secondly, those whom misfortune has deprived of
settled home life. Thirdly, those who, having settled homes, live at
starvation point.

In London there is a great number of each class. With class one I shall
deal briefly, for they do not form a pleasant theme. The best place to
study these wild homeless women is Holloway Prison, for here you will
find them by the hundreds any day you please. In Holloway Prison during
one year 933 women who had been in that gaol more than ten times were
again received into it.

I am privileged sometimes to address them. As I write I see them sitting
before me. After one of my addresses I was speaking to one of the
wardresses about their repeated convictions, when the wardress said--

"Oh, sir, we are glad to see them come back again, for we know that they
are far better off with us than they are at liberty. They go out clean
and tidy with very much better health than they came in. It seems cruel
to let them out, to live again in dirt and misery, and though we have an
unpleasant duty to perform in cleansing them when they return, we feel
some comfort in the thought that for a short time they will be cared
for. Why, sir, it is prison and prison alone that keeps them alive."

Now this army of women is a dolorous army in all truth, for their faces,
their figures are alike strange and repulsive, and many of them seem
to be clothed with the cerements of moral and spiritual death. They are
frequently charged with drunkenness, stealing, begging, or sleeping out.

Their names appear on the "Black List," for the law says they are
"habitual inebriates," yet drink has little or nothing to do with their
actual condition.

Let any one look them in the face as I have looked them in the face,
study their photographs as I have studied them, and I venture to affirm
that they will say with me, "These women are not responsible beings."
For years I have been drumming this fact into the ears of the public,
and at length the authorities acknowledged it, for in 1907 the Home
Office Inspector issued a report on inebriate re