also aware that in various parts of the whole great district from the Hackney Road to Bishopsgate, and so embracing Spitalfields and part of Whitechapel, far away to Mile End and "Twig Folly," there can be discovered more of want, hunger, and disease than could exist in any free city under heaven, if men were not such hypocrites as to defy and disregard the laws which yet they claim to have a hand in framing, and a power to enforce. Only those who are personally acquainted with such a district can conceive what is the condition of the children of its streets, and yet every ordinary wayfarer of the London thoroughfares may note to what a life some of them are committed. About the outskirts of the markets, round the entrances to railway stations, cowering in the shadows of dark arches, or scrambling and begging by the doors of gin-shops and taverns, the boys—and what is even worse, the girls—are to be seen daily and nightly, uncared for, till they have learnt how {127} to claim the attention of a paternal government by an offence against the law. When once the child, who is a mere unnoted fraction of the population, has so far matriculated in crime as to warrant the interposition of the police, he or she becomes an integer of sufficient importance to be dealt with by a magistrate. Let an infancy of neglect and starvation lead to the reckless pilfering of a scrap of food from a counter, or the abstraction of something eatable or saleable from a market-cart or a porter's sack, and the little unclassified wretch is added as another unit to a body recognised, and in some sense cared for, by the State. As a member of the great "criminal class," the juvenile thief becomes of immediate importance. Even though the few juvenile criminal reformatories be full, the gaol doors are open, and the teachings of evil companionship are consummated by the prison brand. The individual war against society gains strength and purpose, for society itself has acknowledged and resented it. The child has entered on a career, and unless some extra legal interposition shall succeed in changing the course of the juvenile offender by assuming a better guardianship, the boy may become an habitual thief, a full-fledged London ruffian; the girl—? It was with a deep sense of the terrible significance of this question, that a small party of earnest gentlemen met, twenty-seven years ago, in that foul neighbourhood to which I have referred, to consider what should be done to rescue the deserted and destitute girls, some of whom had already been induced to attend a ragged school, which was held in a dilapidated building that had once been a stable.