On my first visit I took the subway or tube to St. Mary’s Station, Whitechapel, and getting out, investigated all that region which lies between there and the Great Eastern Railway Station and Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. I also reconnoitered Bethnal Green. It was a chill, gray, January day. The London haze was gray and heavy, quite depressing. Almost at once I noticed that this region which I was in, instead of being strident and blatant as in America, was peculiarly quiet. The houses, as in all parts of London, were exceedingly low, two and three stories, with occasional four- and five-story buildings for variation, but all built out of that drab, yellowish-gray brick which when properly smoked has such a sad and yet effective air. The streets were not narrow, as in New York’s East Side,--quite the contrary; but the difference in crowds, color, noise, life, was astounding. In New York the East Side streets, as I have said, are almost invariably crowded. Here they were almost empty. The low doors and areaways oozed occasional figures who were either thin, or shabby, or dirty, or sickly, but a crowd was not visible anywhere. They seemed to me to slink along in a half-hearted way and I, for one, experienced no sense of desperado criminality of any kind--only a low despair. The people looked too meek--too law-governed. The policeman must be an immense power in London. Vice?--yes. Poverty?--yes. I saw young boys and girls with bodies which seemed to me to be but half made up by nature--half done. They were ambling, lackadaisical, weary-looking. Low?--yes, in many cases. Filthy?--yes. Savage or dangerous?--not at all. I noticed the large number of cheap cloth caps worn by the men and boys and the large number of dull gray shawls wrapped slatternwise about the shoulders of the women. This world looked sad enough in all conscience, inexpressibly so, but because of the individual houses in many instances, the clean streets and the dark tiny shops, not unendurable--even homey in instances. I ventured to ask a stalwart London policeman--they are all stalwart in London--“Where are the very poor in the East End--the poorest there are?” “Well, most of these people hereabouts have little enough to live on,” he observed, looking straight before him with that charming soldierly air the London policemen have--his black strap under his chin.