There are much cheaper lodging-houses, and one absolutely free one, Medland Hall, on the Ratcliff Highway near Stepney Station. I visited it one November evening at five o'clock. Under a railway arch there was drawn up a tattered regiment of men some 300 strong. Now and again a late-comer arrived and took his place in the rear rank. Two police officers attended to keep order, but in the men there seemed not enough energy left for disorder. Like a cluster of bats they hung, dark, inert, to that wall of the arch which gave some little shelter from the driving rain. There was not one touch of colour in all the dark ranks. Each man seemed to be dressed like his fellows, in something that was black, either originally or made so from the struggle in the mud of life. It was a patient crowd. Now and again a harsh cough sounded from some man, and always he seemed to be trying to smother it, as if unwilling to break into the silence of the common misery; or a lame man shuffled uneasily on his feet, and he also seemed ashamed a little of the noise. At six, when the great bulk of the crowd had been waiting an hour (some of them probably much longer), the order was given to march, and the men filed into Medland Hall, each one getting as he entered a half-pound of bread with a little butter. That was his meal for the night, and, like his bed, it was absolutely free. The bed was a box on the floor, with a seaweed mattress and an oilskin covering. Most of the men were young. Few of them had gone past the labouring age. Some were obviously tuberculous, others crippled with rheumatism. The gathering, too, had its castes. A man who had been once a chief clerk, and who still wore a "boxer" hat in place of the usual cap of the unemployed, was the aristocrat of the doss. This winter (1912) the London authorities, at last awake to the scandal of homeless men wandering or sleeping in the streets, have instituted a system by which the police will find shelter for all who are found without homes. But even that will not remove all the scandal.