In one of our many walks together about the streets of London, I remember with what animation and depth of feeling he discussed this subject. We began somewhere in Westminster with the intention of taking a 'bus at Charing Cross. We found ourselves still walking eastward as we passed Temple Bar, and then agreed to mount a 'bus at Ludgate Circus. We were still on our feet as we went through St. Paul's Churchyard, so decided to walk on to the Bank. But he forgot everything but the poor again until we stopped our walk for a moment at Aldgate Church. Before a 'bus could arrive he was deep in the subject again, and almost mechanically resumed walking. And so, on through Whitechapel and Stepney and Limehouse into Poplar, he discoursed earnestly all the way on the need for poor people's pensions. "Since I prefer to call out-relief a pension," he said, "I'm going to see that it is a real pension, and not a dole. Inadequate out-relief gives the sweater his opportunity. A sympathetic half-crown a week to a worn-out old woman making shirts at ninepence the dozen has the effect of dragging the struggling young widow with a family of children down to accepting the same price. It sometimes takes a whole week to earn one-and-six, so little wonder that the pinch of hunger sends many a young widow to the devil. We may preach that the wages of sin is death, but life isn't worth living at all to many people. An unknown hell has no more terrors to them than an awful earth. "How would I stop this? I would stop it by making it impossible for the old woman to be the unconscious instrument in encompassing the ruin of the young woman. The old woman cannot live on a half-crown dole from the Guardians; so to make a shilling or two more she undercuts the young woman, and the sweater gets them both at reduced wages. Now if the old woman deserves help at all, the help ought to be sufficient to keep her without the necessity of falling into the sweater's net and dragging others with her. The help must be a pension on which she can live. It ought not to be a dole on which she starves." "Then you stand for the Living Pension as well as for the Living Wage?" "Precisely. But nearly all pension schemes, like most out-relief systems, fix the allowance at a starvation figure. Sums of four or five shillings won't save old people from hardship. For example, we have in the Poplar workhouse old pensioners who received as much as six shillings a week. They found they couldn't live outside on that, and so had no alternative but the House. Only the other day there was another six-shilling pensioner admitted to the House. He had struggled on outside in his one room, selling and pawning his few things bit by bit to eke out a living until he hadn't a stick left. So, although receiving a pension of six shillings a week, he was forced into the workhouse." "Do you find the same thing happening in regard to old people assisted by a friendly society or a trade union?"