“It will thus be seen that provision has been made in and around London for the proper education and training of more than two thousand poor children. We have, moreover, sanctioned arrangements whereby, when completed, the state of the children of other metropolitan parishes will be very materially improved.” About nine hundred children are congregated at Norwood, and out of the whole number there is not perhaps a dozen the offspring of decent parents. Many are foundlings, picked up at the corners of streets, or at the doors of parish officers. The names of some of them suggest an idea of how they began life. Thus, one owned the name of Olive Jewry, whilst another was called Alfred City. Others have lost both parents by death, and been left puling living legacies to the parish, but the majority are the children of parents living in workhouses. When able-bodied paupers claim relief, they are “offered the house.” They are received into the Union, and their children are sent up to this out-of-town school, that fresh air, cleanliness, good food and the schoolmaster, may try what can be done to lift them up from the slough of pauperism. Let us examine the process through which they go. The children, on their first appearance at this Norwood School, are usually in the most lamentable plight. Ignorance and dirt, rags and vermin, laziness and ill health, diseased scalps, and skins tortured by itch, are their characteristics. They are the very dregs of the population of the largest city in the world—the human waifs and strays of the modern Babylon; the children of poverty, and misery, and crime; in very many cases labouring under physical defects, such as bad sight or hearing; almost always stunted in their growth, and bearing the stamp of ugliness and suffering on their features. Generally born in dark alleys and back courts, their playground has been the streets, where the wits of many have been prematurely sharpened at the expense of any morals they might have. With minds and bodies destitute of proper nutriment, they are caught, as it were, by the parish officers, like half-wild creatures, roaming poverty-stricken amidst the wealth of our greatest city; and half-starved in a land where the law says no one shall be destitute of food and shelter. When their lucky fate sends them to Norwood, they are generally little personifications of genuine poverty—compounds, as somebody says, of ignorance, gin, and sprats.