"Pauperism is on the increase in the metropolis. Last week relief was given to 53,164 indoor, and 35,110 outdoor paupers. The total shows an increase of 2011 over the corresponding week last year. Trafalgar Square pavement is half covered nightly with houseless vagrants, and church steps, benches, and doorways in nearly all parts of London have their complements of destitute people after midnight. Many resort to the parks in the daytime to obtain on the grass the sleep which they are unable to get on the stones by night, and begging cannot be suppressed by the police." WALT WHITMAN, the odd and original American poet, enjoys in his declining years and feeble health the admiration of a large number of literary friends, who are to build him a beautiful little cottage. His special admirers regard him as the greatest of American poets, and he has equally warm admirers among the foreign literati. A Walt Whitman club is to be established in his honor at Philadelphia. Yet it is not long since Mr. Whitman was made the target of the "prurient prudes," who carry on the Comstockian movement of the Vice Society, and was ordered to expunge some of his writings. Mr. Whitman defied them, and his literary prestige has sustained him; but Mrs. Elmina Drake Slenker, of Western Virginia, a woman of humble surroundings, has been pounced upon, arrested, and placed on trial for discussing in private correspondence physiological questions in reproduction which might have been discussed by physicians in medical journals with impunity. Her friends regard this as an outrage, considering her exemplary character and philanthropic motives. The Congressional law under which the prosecution of Mrs. Slenker has been instituted, is a specimen of hasty legislation, rushed through in the last hours of the 42d session, more than one-half of all the acts being passed on the last day and night amid the most disgraceful confusion and uproar. A well-educated community will learn that the charge of obscenity in such cases expresses a quality which belongs neither to nature nor art, but to the foul minds in which such ideas rise. This was illustrated by an intelligent judge in Maine. _The Health Monthly_ says: