But the very mention of these places brings the reflection that not in outlying districts, but in the very heart of {232} London, in the core of the great city itself, the canker of misery, poverty, and vice is festering still. What is the use of eviction, when the law punishes houselessness, and the Poor Law cannot meet any sudden demand, nor maintain any continuous claim on the part of the houseless? Summarily to thrust a score or so of wretched families into the streets is to make them either criminals or paupers. They must find some place of shelter; and if they are to live by their labour, they must live near their labour, the wages of which are, at best, only just sufficient to procure for them necessary food and covering for their bodies. In the neighbourhood to which I have already referred, four thousand evictions have taken place, or, at any rate, the population has diminished from 22,000 to 18,000, because of a small section of a large puzzle map of courts and alleys having been taken down in order to build great blocks of warehouses. The consequence is, that in the remaining tangle of slums the people herd closer, and that a large number of poor lodgers have gone to crowd other tenements not far distant, and which were already peopled beyond legal measure. For this acreage of vice and wretchedness of which I speak is close to the great city thoroughfares—almost within sound of Bow Bells. It is about a quarter of a mile in extent each way, lying between the Charterhouse and St. Luke's, close to the new meat market at Smithfield on one side, and Finsbury Square on the other. One entrance to it is directly through Golden Lane, Barbican; the other close to Bunhill Fields burial ground, along a passage which bears the significant name of "Chequer Alley." It is a maze of intersecting and interlocking courts, streets, and alleys, some of them {233} without any thoroughfare, some reached by ascending or descending steps, many of them mere tanks, the walls of which are represented by hovels inhabited by costermongers, French-polishers, dock-labourers, chair-makers, workers at all kinds of underpaid labour and poor handicrafts. Many of the women go out to work at factories, or at charing, and the children are—or at least were—left to the evil influences of the streets, till another and a more powerful influence began to operate, slowly, but with the impetus of faith and love, to touch even this neglected and miserable quarter of London with "the light that lighteth every man." In this square quarter of a mile—which, starting from the edge of Aldersgate, stretches to the further main thoroughfare abutting on the pleasant border of the City Road, and includes the northern end of Whitecross Street—there are eighty public-houses and beer-shops!