“However miserable these rooms may be they are yet too dear for many, who wander about all day seeking to get a living as well as they can, and at night take shelter in one of the common lodging-houses, of which there are so many. The lodging-houses are often the meeting place of thieves and vagabonds of the lowest sort, and some are even kept by the receivers of stolen goods. In the kitchen men and women may be seen cooking their food, doing their washing, or lounging around smoking and gambling. In the sleeping room there is a long row of beds on each side, as many as sixty or eighty in a single room. In many lodging-houses the two sexes are permitted to lodge together without any regard for the commonest decency. Yet there is still a lower step. Hundreds cannot procure even the twopence necessary to secure the privilege of passing a night in the stuffy air of these dormitories; and so they lie down on the steps and in the passage ways, where it is nothing uncommon in the early morning to find six or eight human beings huddled together or stretched out.” [277] We may limit ourselves to this sketch of the habitation—all the other living conditions conform thereto. With so miserable a material life there can be no question of the intellectual life. Continual poverty and the permanent fear of dying of hunger destroy all that is noble in man and reduce him to the condition of a beast, without any aspiration for higher things; for those who have come to this state from the more favored classes become more and more degraded and have soon lost the little knowledge they acquired in earlier periods. Servility and lack of self-respect are necessary to the poor if they are to get the alms they need to keep them alive, since they occupy no place in the economic life. Between them and the workers there is an enormous difference; they have no feeling of solidarity in the social life. What is the origin of the lower proletariat, from what classes is it recruited? If we are to believe many criminologists and sociologists the answer to this question ought to be that their poverty is not due to social conditions but exclusively to themselves; that they are inferior by nature. But to get a true answer we must put the question in this way: do the existing social classes form the groups into which men would be classified according to their qualities?