“The high and the low are here, the joyful and the sorrowful are here; men are dying here; men are being born; men are praying—on the other side of the brick partition, men are cursing; around them is all the vast void of night. The proud grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons or reposes within damask curtains. Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers, hungerstricken, into its lair of straw. In obscure cellars, squalid poverty languidly emits its voice of destiny to haggard, hungry villains, while landlords sit as counsellors of state, plotting and playing their high chess game, whereof the pawns are _men_.” [Illustration: THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.] “The blushing maiden, listening to whisperings of love, is urged to trust him who, in all probability, seeks to rob her of that crown of glory without which woman is indeed a ‘poor thing.’ A thousand gin palaces are open, and are at this moment crowded with drinking and drunken men and women—perhaps far less of males than of females. Gay mansions with supper rooms and dancing halls are full of light and music and high-swelling hearts. But, in yonder condemned cells, the pulse of life beats tremulous and faint. The sleepless and blood-shot eyes look through the darkness that is around and within for the last stern morning. Full three millions of two-legged animals lie around us in horizontal positions, their heads in night-caps and their hearts full of foolish dreams. Riot cries aloud and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame.” “The mother, with streaming hair and bleeding heart, kneels over her pallid, dying infant, whose beastly father is drunk and cursing; all these heaped and huddled together with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; all crammed in like salted fish in their barrel, or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get his head above the others.” This is as true now as it was in Carlyle’s day. Such work goes on every night of the year. Having seen these things myself, I speak what I do know. I am truly glad that London is in England, and not in our beloved country. I hope we may never have a city as large as this, for I am thoroughly convinced that it is not good for so many men and women to dwell together.