There were a few children, precocious and old-looking, treading rapidly in their father’s steps, born to people these wretched dens, and to fill the reformatories and gaols of their native land. These nests of crime, these social ulcers, which eat into the heart of this London of ours, defy alike the efforts of benevolence and the sword of the law to cure or eradicate them. But one hope, one resource remains—to cut off the springs by which they are fed, to send the children to schools and reformatories before they are utterly hardened and debased, to make them useful, industrious men, and to show them the happiness of honest labour, and the inevitable misery of crime. Thus, and thus only, can the evil be reached. For the men, reformation is hopeless. They must be treated as savage beasts, and caged as such. And that not merely till the first paroxysm of rage and evil is past, to be then turned loose under the protection of a ticket-of-leave, to prey upon society. The tiger who appears to sleep in his cage, with his glossy paw extended and these terrible claws folded up, is the same tiger who in his native wilds slew men and beasts and drank their blood. Who would think of letting him loose again, to range with unrestrained freedom? Why, then, should these men-tigers be permitted to work their savage wills? Should they not rather, when once, by repeated crimes, they have shown that their nature is thoroughly evil, be taken for ever from the world, of which they are scourges, not to be confined for life in a cell, but only until they learn that labour is a boon. Then they should be put to pass their lives in labouring for the good of that society to whom their existence has hitherto been a curse. Through this den William Holl went. Beyond it the dwellings became, scarcer; but the lanes were bounded by high walls, or large rambling buildings, the odour of tan and hide from which sufficiently indicated the trade carried on within them.