Let me take a single case. Jack Smith, as we will call him, was the son of a Scotch piper. He was born—or he has heard his mother say so—in one of the vast number of the courts that lead out of the Strand. His father was in the army, but on his discharge took to playing in the streets and in public-houses for his living till his death a few years back. As to his mother—hear this, ye sentimentalists who say pretty things about a mother’s love!—she deserted the boy, and left him to shift for himself. He took, of course, to selling lights and newspapers. When he got money he lodged in the Mint, when he had not, he slept in the barges off Thames Street. At last one morning he was caught by a policeman, and hauled before the Lord Mayor. The latter let him off that time, but warned the boy that if he were caught again it would be the duty of society to send him to gaol. What can such a boy think of society? Will he be very grateful for its kindness, or very anxious for its welfare? I think not. London, it is calculated, contains ten thousand of these shoeless, homeless, friendless, forsaken, ragged, unwashed, uncombed young urchins of doubtful antecedents. It is difficult to trace their genealogies, and it is still more difficult to understand why they ever came into existence at all. They are not a blessing either to father or mother, and as a rule may be said to deny the existence of parental authority altogether. “Mother dead; father gone for a soldier—a sailor”—as the case may be—is the common result of all inquiry; and, when it is not so, when father and mother do “turn up”—“turn up” from the nearest gin-shop, all redolent of its perfume—it is not always to the boy’s advantage. Solomon says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child;” he might have said the same of many who are not children; and what is to be expected of a boy who is born and bred, as it were, in the streets of London? I have known wise fathers have foolish sons. I have seen the children of what are called pious people go astray. In the very city of London many are the ministers’ and clergymen’s sons who kick over the traces. The crop of wild oats sown by some of these young fellows is really astonishing. It was only the other day that the son of the foremost baronet in Evangelical circles, the last scion as it were of a noble house, stood trembling at the bar of the Old Bailey. But these children of the gutter have never had a chance of going right. No mother has watched their every step—no father has held up to them a living example of truth and integrity and right—no teacher has waited the dawning of their young intellect—no Christian minister has moulded and guided the workings of their young hearts—the atmosphere in which they live and move and have their being as of poverty and crime. Mostly they run away from home, the home of the thief and the harlot and the drunkard, and what they learn they learn in the back streets of