England

of the English horse and the serene confidence in human nature of the London cat are two outward and visible signs of the absence of cruelty in the

er pessimistic calculation) called them. English statesmanship has so far failed to grapple successfully with the pauper population, and the even more pitiful class which struggles grimly on the edge of pauperism; but

them then on their pilgrimage to London. With the first hint of winter the unemployed or the casual worker who knows the rules of the game heads for London. In t

placing the manual worker where the tillage of the soil still survives. But there is surprisingly little machinery used in British agriculture as compared with that of Canada, the United States, and Australia. The very small

aveller were passing away from, not approaching, the great industrial centre. Leaving Luton and coming through to St. Albans the country smiles in green pleasantness within sight and sound, almost, of London. Birds see the sky and rejoice. Hayricks warm the landscape with their golden yellow, and over the stubble fields st

illing for the berries at the next town. His age was sixty-six, and he had been in his young prime a navvy and road labourer. Now he was past all hope of further employment as a labourer, and navvying work was impossible. Proudly he boasted that he had never been "in trouble," and had never actually begged, though in the main he lived on charity. His winters, it s

om Manchester, having been on the road since the previous Sunday (the day was Saturday), and the golden goal at the end of his journey was a week's work at the Islington Agricultural Show, which had been promised to

He was something a little higher than a casual labourer, and had a "trade," if one might call it so: that of a porte

ghts turned to the soil, and while he was working in Durham as a casual porter he would in slack times always try to get out to the fields. He had never married; there was no hope of married life in his calling. He had tried to get a more steady sort of job as a painter, as an ironmonger's assistant; but his leg was a

e ranks of the workers, and had never begged a meal or a shilling in his life, and w

. But he was unemployed, and had been for some months. That morning he had got up at five o'clock to tramp eight miles to a suburb of Newcastle in the hope of getting a place on a little church-repair

￡2:1:6 a week he had nothing at all left to tide over a week without work. That set his thoughts to matrimony and he "settled down." Since then his finances had been much more steady and prosperous. While he was in work he always paid his wife 30s. a week out of his wages, no more and no less. "He didn't come asking her for some

ret of the housekeeping in unemployed times was perhaps the fact that they had two lodgers, who paid 3s. 6d. a week each for their quarters and paid for the "raw material" of their meals, having

F AMBERLEY, G

elf, but not poaching on the remainder. Probably the wife has much the harder life of the two, with her 30s. a week steady when the good man is in

dences of that beautiful love of the green fields which the English seem to have by nature. In London the position is more depressing, for there one encounters a vast army

that he has been in work, and prepares with zest to tap the old springs of alms. London promises him winter comfort, human companionship; warm nights in shelters, when politics can be discussed and the state of the nation learnedly argued; amusing tests

was at once depressing and enraging. I cursed the weather, and London, and the resolution which had brought me on the enterprise. It seemed as if it would be just heaven to have clean feet, and stout soles between them and the loathsome dirt. I was wet through a

ing in the thick atmosphere were sympathetic to the place. I passed on. That dossery could be investigated another time, on some night when the streets were dry. At a "Rowton House" in Whitechapel I found a clean and endu

ers attended to keep order, but in the men there seemed not enough energy left for disorder. Like a cluster of bats they hung, dark, inert, to that wall of the arch which gave some little shelter from the driving rain. There was not one touch of colour in all the dark ranks. Each man seemed to be dressed like his fellows, in something that was black

and the men filed into Medland Hall, each one getting as he entered a half-pound of bread with a little butter. That was his meal for

thers crippled with rheumatism. The gathering, too, had its castes. A man who had been once a chief clerk,

ndering or sleeping in the streets, have instituted a system by which the police will find

the Strand and other places giving shelter from the rain. With the use of any intelligence at all, it seemed, a man could get shelter of a sort and food of a sort. Yet people, I know, did in rare cases actually perish from exposure and from hunger in London. Inquiring among the Embankment men, the unhappiest of all the miserable army, the

le bed in London. At any rate, when I gave him a shilling he made no move away from his seat, showed, indeed, very little interest in the dole. His was an extreme case, but many seemed to be almost as dead

ce" Anglican, or Roman Catholic or Wesleyan of the most fervent type. His religious views are strong to the point of bigotry. But should he have a wife and household to maintain by

s that by going the round it is possible to avoid all danger of becoming too familiar at any one of them, and since there

t charity. But it is a constant temptation to him to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of t

d had their brains extracted while at school-had some grim reasonableness in his fancifulness. When honest work offers a hope of progressive betterment the enthusiasm for it is natural. When, as for too many, honest work offers nothing but a subsistence fractionally better than that of the dishonest loafer it is surprising not that the

THE TOWER BRIDG

wiser organisation of the national life offering more opportunity and less charity. On this point I have sought the views of several clergymen working in the East End, the poor quarter of London. They were all proud, and justifiably so, of the various efforts made to salve the lot of the poor-the university settlements, the hospitals, infirmaries, nursing associations, charitable and semi-charitable dormitories, the associations for the supply of food, clothing, coal, and the like. But not on

ing. The proportion that is absolutely hopeless was variously stated. It may be averaged, in their opinion, at 5 per ce

per cent of the total English population as hopelessly "down." It is a bad wastage when one thinks that every human cre