For many years the charitable provision for the homeless in London has been ample, and I could not at first find an explanation for the Thames Embankment miserables who huddled on the seats throughout the nights and had their shivering sleep disturbed again and again by the police, or for the unfortunates who haunted "the Dark Arches" of the Strand and other places giving shelter from the rain. With the use of any intelligence at all, it seemed, a man could get shelter of a sort and food of a sort. Yet people, I know, did in rare cases actually perish from exposure and from hunger in London. Inquiring among the Embankment men, the unhappiest of all the miserable army, there seemed to be always one of two explanations for haunting the Embankment--either the desperate sense of shame of the man who has come down from a position of some comfort and decency and shuns a shelter because it means a display of his misery; or the dull lethargy that comes from extreme hardship and kills every suggestion of self-help. One unemployed with whom I conversed, or tried to converse, at midnight just near the Temple Pier was sunk in such apathy that he, I verily believe, would not have walked 400 yards to get the most comfortable bed in London. At any rate, when I gave him a shilling he made no move away from his seat, showed, indeed, very little interest in the dole. His was an extreme case, but many seemed to be almost as dead to any idea of effort. "With the use of any intelligence" a man can get shelter--yes. But the man who is down often loses his intelligence as he sinks. The "cunning" unemployed, on the other hand, flourishes. In China they have a term "rice Christians" for heathen who pretend conversion to Christianity in order to secure food from the missionaries. The cunning unemployed is usually a "rice" Anglican, or Roman Catholic or Wesleyan of the most fervent type. His religious views are strong to the point of bigotry. But should he have a wife and household to maintain by the sweat of his brain it will often happen that, while he is a rice Anglican of the most uncompromising type, she is a rice Wesleyan or professor of some other type of Nonconformity. For the man who has made a study of the art of living without work London offers a vast field. There are so many charities that by going the round it is possible to avoid all danger of becoming too familiar at any one of them, and since there is no effective safeguard against overlapping it is easy to be getting help from two or even more sources simultaneously. This state of affairs, of course, does not help the genuine unemployed, the man who wants work and not charity. But it is a constant temptation to him to drop his self-respect and sink to the level of the men who, he finds, live just as comfortably without labour as he is able to do by steady industry.