of our Sunday and Ragged Schools afford to the young poor of our metropolis. A blade of grass to them is a rarity, and, in their eyes, more precious than emeralds to a duchess. They have been accustomed to see leaves and flowers isolated in window-sills, faded and dwarfed themselves by the want of pure air and natural sunlight—but fields and hedgerows and woods, uplands studded with trees, and valleys down which rippled a stream of living waters—such a picture had never entered their imagination. Their little minds were squared and hardened by the begrimed bricks and gritty flags of their own sombre courts.
This is unquestionably a shocking state of things. From whatever point of view we regard it, it is equally deplorable. The result is that London produces an artificial human being weak in body and deformed in mind. The little Bedouin of our streets is born in a densely crowded court, and bred in the seething haunts of depravity; all his faculties are stunted and perverted, and he has no healthy appreciation—no healthy enjoyment of life. The sounds with which his ear is most familiar are those of railing and cursing; the sights which meet his eye are repulsive and demoralising—shadow, shadow everywhere—and in the thick gloom of this fearful social darkness, like cryptogamic plants, he vegetates rather than lives. The only vigour which he manifests is that of a precocious and preternatural shrewdness, which enables him to graduate early in the science of wickedness and vice. From infancy to manhood he is taught to war against his species, and prides himself in the ignoble triumph of “doing” his fellows. Nor is this to be wondered at. Uncared for, an outcast from all that is good, a Pariah from the better influences of society, an Ishmaelite, indeed, in this hand-to-mouth course of existence, this deadly struggle to obtain a livelihood—he cannot but contract the meanest habits and develope the least worthy qualities of his human nature.
Is there no means of counteracting this growing and perilous mass of living, active evil? Is it ever to be in our midst the prolific seed of corruption? Is this gangrene for ever to eat into the vitals of our metropolitan population? Is there no remedy against its extension? Are we powerless before this monster of mischief?
Let us investigate the causes. They may be reduced under two heads, viz., the densely-crowded state of those districts in which the poor live, and the want of light, air, and redeeming scenes.
The densely-crowded districts! It is impossible for any one who has not seen and examined a Spitalfields or Houndsditch for themselves, to conceive a hundredth part of the wretchedness which is produced by this overpopulation. A few years since the evils resulting from this system had risen to such a height that Parliament interfered, and a remedy was applied in the shape of a Lodging House Act. For a short while the abomination was mitigated, but only to burst forth again with fresh horrors. The crowded state of London thoroughfares, the vast and expanding proportions of London trade and commerce, required new streets to be laid down, new docks to be constructed, new railways to be pushed almost into the heart of the metropolis. As a matter of economy the streets, the docks, and the railways were constructed in the poorest localities, where the value of property was proportionately low. One thing, however, was overlooked. In the calculations which surveyors and contractors made, the convenience of the poor had no place. Houses were demolished without one thought as to where the humble, helpless occupant could go. In the construction of the new streets in St. Giles’s, of Cannon Street, of Victoria Street, Westminster, of the Blackwall railway and the Victoria Docks, a city of tenements was annihilated, and those who lived there were ruthlessly turned adrift, without shelter, or the prospect of shelter. Some idea of the enormity of this cruel thoughtlessness may be derived from a single fact: in one district alone sixteen hundred houses were demolished, whilst only four hundred were built up to replace them. The occupants of sixteen hundred houses had therefore to be crowded into the four hundred, or seek a habitation in some remote district. Of course what was bad before became exaggeratedly worse afterwards. It is not enough to say that the evil has become fourfold, it may be said to be a hundredfold—for vice, crime, and disease multiply in a geometrical ratio.
It has been urged that when the Legislature concedes a railway which proposes to pass through a densely-populated neighbourhood, the Company should be compelled to make good the damage which they inflict upon the poor, by filling up the void which they create, and that for every tenement they destroy they should reconstruct a new one. Creditable, however, as these philanthropic desires may be to the heart, they will not suffer investigation. The principle is opposed to sound political economy, and therefore must be dismissed. What we would point out is, that a good work can yet be accomplished, that the poor can yet be rescued from the sickening depravity in which they wallow—are forced to wallow. By the erection of Model Lodging Houses the gross evil of which we complain can be remedied—and profitably remedied, by those, too, who, not actuated by purely philanthropic motives, would like to turn even a Samaritan action to “their own advantage.” It has been found by experience that Model Lodging Houses will pay—that they return a very fair dividend to the invester, whilst they are really productive of incalculable benefits to the poor. In St. Pancras, in St. Giles’s, in Gray’s Inn Lane, the experiment has been tried, and with good results. No better example need be sought than that of Gray’s Inn Lane. It is erected in a swarming locality, where nothing but courts and alleys, crowded with the lowest class of Irish, abound. It rises in the midst of a dreary cluster, like an oasis in a desert, and order and cleanliness, comparatively speaking, reign within its walls. Not long since, too, another Model Lodging House was opened, with no small degree of éclat, at the East End, under the auspices of Mr. Waterlow, and it has been suggested that a portion of the magnificent donation of Mr. Peabody, the American merchant, could not be better laid out than in rearing these habitations in various parts of Lon-