Surely when Queen Victoria commenced her reign the sun never shone on a darker land than ours. Ignorance, poverty, intemperance, licentiousness ran riot—in spite of the fact that good people were subscribing their tens of thousands to spread the Bible all over the world and to convert the heathen, who many of them lived more decent lives than our own people. Not far from the scene of which I write, a noble lord, who had been a sailor and had a fine gift of swearing, presided over a local meeting of the British and Foreign Bible Society. As a chairman he laboured under many difficulties, but he managed to make a short speech, in which he assured his hearers that the society was a d---d good one and deserved to be d---d well supported. The country life of the gentleman was just what we see it in ‘Tom Jones.’ In the towns things were little better. Lives were shortened by intemperance and neglect of all sanitary requirements. The employer had no thought for the people he employed. The peasant and the workman had little done for them, the pauper had even less. There were no cheap newspapers to stir up the sleeping intellect of the country. If such a thing as a national conscience existed it was very feeble—eaten up with pride. The Englishman was dead to the needs of the times. The bitter cry of the distressed had not then sounded over the land. Little children from four to eight years of age, the majority of them orphans, the rest sold by brutal parents, were trained as chimney-sweeps. In order to make their skins tough and not to suffer as they climbed they were rubbed with brine before a hot fire. They were liable to what was called chimney sweeper’s cancer. They were often suffocated by soot and died when at work. Often they were stifled by the hot sulphurous air in the flues; often they would stick in the chimney and faint from the effects of terror, exhaustion and foul air. Lighted straw was used to bring them round, and if that failed they were often half killed, and sometimes killed outright, by the efforts to extricate them. Sailors were sent to sea in ships heavily insured—and great was the loss of valuable life—in order that some shipowners might reap a hellish profit. It was reckoned that at that time the preventible mortality of the country was annually 90,000. In 1843 there were 1,500 young persons of fourteen and upwards engaged as milliners and dressmakers in the Metropolis. Their hours were from fifteen to eighteen a day, with only a little interval of rest, and the consequence was that consumption and impaired eyesight were terribly prevalent among them.