Before long I spent portions of some days in exploring the Palace grounds, and interviewing persons who had evidence to give, or interest to use, on behalf of a change which seemed so desirable. Eventually I brought the matter before a meeting I knew to be interested in ethical improvement, and read to them the draft of a memorial that I thought ought to be sent to the Archbishop at Lambeth Palace. Persons in stations low and high alike, often suffer wrong to exist which they might arrest, because they have not seen it to be wrong or have not been told that it is so. Blame of any one could not be justly expressed who had not personal knowledge of an evil complained of. Therefore I urged that we should give the Archbishop information which we thought justified his action, and I was authorised to send to him the memorial I had read. I wrote myself to his Grace, stating that I could testify as to the social facts detailed in the memorial I enclosed, which was as follows:-- "May it please your Grace,--We, the evening congregation assembled in South Place Chapel, Finsbury--some assenting and some dissenting from the tenets represented by your Grace--represented as worthily as by any one who has occupied your high station, and with greater fairness to those who stand outside the Church than is shown by many prelates--we pray your Grace to give heed to a secular plea on behalf of certain little neighbours of yours whom, amid the pressure of spiritual duties, your Grace may have overlooked. "Crouching under the very walls of Lambeth Palace, where your Grace has the pleasant responsibility of illustrating the opulence and paternal sympathy of the legal Church of the land, lie streets as dismal, cheerless, and discreditable as any that God in His wrath ever permitted to remain unconsumed. In the houses are polluted air, squalor, dirt and pale-faced children. The only green thing upon which their feverish eyes could look is enclosed in your Grace's Palace Park, and shut out from their sight by dead walls. What we pray is that your Grace, in mercy and humanity, will substitute for those penal walls some pervious palisades through which children may behold the refreshing paradise of Nature, though they may never enter therein. In this ever-crowding metropolis, where field and tree belong to the extinct sights of a happier age, children are born and die without ever knowing their soothing charm, and hunger and thirst for a green thing to look upon--as sojourners in a desert do for the sight of shrub or water. No prayer your Grace could offer to heaven would be so welcome in its kindly courts, as the prayer of gladness and gratitude which would go up with the screams of change and joy from the pallid little ones, breathing the fresh air from the green meadows, which only a few more fortunate sheep now enjoy.