‘Perhaps,’ was the cynical reply. ‘You are everlastingly talking,’ he continued, ‘of an outcast London; but, after all, it is on outcast London that the chief blame of its misery lies. Let us have an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at once, in outcast London, where boys and girls become fathers and mothers before they are out of their teens, and when they have no chance of earning a living, and know not and care not for the little ones they bring into the world. In respectable London a man does not marry till he fancies he can keep a wife. In outcast London it is the reverse. In such a case population represents the thoughtlessness of the nation. In many cases it represents the most brutal selfishness. Men and women can’t complain if they reap what they have sown; but have not we a right to say a word on behalf of the children? For men and women to bring up their children in the way in which it is done in outcast London is a crime. To bring a baby into the world to lead a diseased and wretched life where it can never get a mouthful of wholesome food, a ray of sunlight, a particle of fresh air, to curse a young life that God meant to be so full of bliss, is a crime so awful that we can see no fitting punishment. To improve outcast London the first thing is to stop the supply. There is no remedy if reckless pauperism is to be allowed to grow rampant in our midst. ‘One word more,’ said Wentworth. ‘Suppose we think more of the decent poor, and less of the outcast. Suppose we give the respectable working man as much sympathy as we give his good-for-nothing brother. Suppose we take the sober operative as much by the hand as we do the inebriate. Suppose we act on the idea that industry is honourable, and that the men who live by it are men to be honoured; that the world with all its blessings is for the worker, whether he tills the soil or ploughs the deep, whether he builds the loftiest viaduct or burrows in the deepest mine.’ CHAPTER XXXII. CONSULTATION. They were sitting one morning at breakfast—that pleasantest of meals, unless you have to be up at an unusually early hour to catch the train and be off to London. Modern life is not such an improvement on that of the past as we are apt to fancy. The breakfast was the one meal at which people could meet and discuss matters—private, local, political, literary, or religious, in an informal way. We have no pleasant breakfast in these more ostentatious days, when society is too large to admit of friendship; but it seems to me that in my younger days we got a good deal more pleasure out of life. No wonder, then, that we sigh for the good old times, and long for their revival; that we have Queen Anne furniture, and houses built in what is called the Elizabethan style, and an effort to do away with the rail, and to revive the far-famed coaches with four horses which were the delight of the nation in the Georgian days.