Doubtless at the present time the deaconess who will answer to the greatest number of immediate wants is the "parish-deaconess," or the home mission deaconess, as we may call her. Her usefulness has been well tested in the great cities of Germany, France, and England, as we have seen. Perhaps nowhere is her work better appreciated than in London, the greatest city of modern times. The tendency of this age of manufactures and commerce is to attract laborers and workers from country homes, where work has become less open to them through the increased use of agricultural machines of all kinds, into cities, where factories, shops, counting-rooms, and offices constantly afford openings. London has felt the full force of this movement. In 1836 her population was about equal to that of New York, including Brooklyn and Jersey City. Now the great city contains 5,500,000 inhabitants. It is growing at the rate of over 100,000 a year, nor is there any influence at work to stop its growth. The same causes that produce it are constantly at work. The great massing of the population together, with the unequaled increase in the wealth of the people, make the contrast of riches and poverty striking and obvious. The west of London, with its vast wealth, its homes of refinement and elegance, and its appliances for the enjoyment of art, science, and literature, is separated from the poverty, the degradation, the misery, and the sorrow of the East End by a gulf as great as that which separated Lazarus from Dives. It is difficult for those who are at ease, whose lives, to use Wordsworth's felicitous phrase, are made up "of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows"--it is difficult for such even faintly to apprehend the dullness, the drudgery, and the hardships of those who, even at the best estate, are obliged to live in such surroundings. The vast metropolis a few years ago was for a short time shaken out of its lethargy by a voice that would be heard, when _The Bitter Cry of Outcast London_ was published. "Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amid horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave-ship. To go into them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewerage, refuse scattered in all directions, and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, many of them, which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air. You have to ascend rotten stair-cases, grope your way along dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin. Then, if you are not driven back by the intolerable stench, you may gain admittance into the dens in which these thousands of beings herd together. Eight feet square! That is about the average size of many of these rooms.... Where there are beds they are simply heaps of dirty rags, shavings, or straw, but for the most part