_Unconscious Influence of Good Neighbors._--I would venture to say that there is not an immoral man or woman in neighborhoods known as disreputable, however completely he or she may have cast off self-restraint and regard for character, who has not daily examples of persons, close to such homes and haunts of vice, living honest and morally clean lives, and who is not, to a degree not consciously known, restrained and influenced by the contact. . . . Space will not permit many instances to be stated, but, as illustrating what I am wishful to make clear, I give two. In a court behind a street well known as bearing almost the worst character in Manchester lives a man, paralyzed, unable to leave an old sofa which has been his bed for months. He was in the Royal Infirmary, and there pronounced incurable, but likely to live years with ordinary care. He could have been taken to the workhouse hospital at Crumpsall, where he would have {216} had careful nursing and suitable food. He has no dread of the workhouse hospital, and would gladly go if he had any hope of cure. He speaks most gratefully of his treatment at the Royal Infirmary. But there is no hope of cure, and his wife and he have determined to keep together while he lives, and he refuses the comforts of the hospital, and she refuses to let him go from her. She has made her home in this court, working in the room in which he lies, with only another room for their four children. She earns an average of 5s. weekly; her eldest boy earns at a situation 5s. more, and on what is left out of 10s., after paying 2s. 6d. rent, and buying coal and light, the six live. (The condition of things is now improved by the guardians deciding to take two of the children into Swinton Schools.) This is a simple and very ordinary story. But what is the effect of the woman's work? She says little to her neighbors. Her high purpose and her complete devotion to her husband and children have made other women ashamed of sin, and made men wish themselves worthy of women like her. She has no thought that she is doing anything but giving her life for her husband and children, has no knowledge of what the words "unconscious influence" mean--but none the less she is "a light shining in a dark place."