I have had occasion lately to take you with me to some of the worst "parts of London." The phrase has become so common, that there is some difficulty in deciding what it means; and we are obliged to come to the conclusion, that in every quarter of this great metropolis, large and lofty buildings, splendid mansions, gorgeous shops, and even stately palaces, are but symbols of the partial and imperfect development of true national greatness, and can scarcely be regarded as complete evidences of genuine civilisation, if by that word we are to mean more than was expressed by it in heathen times, and amidst pagan people. Perhaps there is no more terrible reflection, amidst all the pomp and magnificence, the vast commercial enterprise and constantly accumulating wealth of this mighty city, than that here we may also find the extremes of want and misery, of vice and poverty, of ignorance and suffering. Side by side with all that makes material greatness—riches, learning, luxury, extravagance—are examples of the deepest necessity and degradation. "The rich and the poor" do indeed "meet together" in a very sad sense. It would be well {249} if the former would complete the text for themselves, and take its meaning deep into their hearts. There is reason for devout thankfulness, however, that here and there amidst the abodes of rich and poor alike, some building with special characteristics may be seen; that not only the church but the charity which represents practical religion does make vigorous protest against the merely selfish heaping-up of riches without regard to the cry of the poor. There are few neighbourhoods in which a Refuge for the homeless, a soup-kitchen, a ragged-school, a "servants home," an orphanage, a hospital or some asylum for the sick and suffering, does not relieve that sense of neglect and indifference which is the first painful impression of the thoughtful visitor to those "worst quarters," which yet lie close behind the grand thoroughfares and splendid edifices that distinguish aristocratic and commercial London. I have said enough for the present about those poverty-haunted districts of Shoreditch, Spitalfields, and Bethnal Green, to warrant me in taking you through them without further comment than suffices to call your attention to the poorly-paid industries, the want and suffering, and the too frequent neglect of the means of health and cleanliness which unhappily distinguish them and the surrounding neighbourhoods lying eastward. The weaver's colony can now scarcely be said to survive the changes wrought by the removal of an entire industry from Spitalfields to provincial manufactories, and the vast importations of foreign silks, and yet there is in this part of London a great population of workers at callings which are scarcely better paid than silk weaving had come to be, previous to its comparative disappearance.