|That the great 'Guilt Gardens' of London are overrun with the rankest of weeds and the most poisonous of plants must by this time be the conclusion of everyone who has studied the mass of literature which the question of the Housing of the Poor has called forth. So thickly do crime and vice and drink and improvidence twine and intertwine and spread themselves over the soil upon the fertilizing juices of which they flourish and grow fouler day by day, that to the casual observer nothing else is visible. But those who have studied the horticulture of the slums know that deep down under all the rank luxuriance of nettle and weed there may be found many a fair flower of humanity. And the fairest of all is the flower which is the offshoot of a weed. The generosity of the very poor to each other is to a great extent the outcome of their improvidence. The poor help the poor. Nowhere are the bonds of human sympathy so strong as down the courts and alleys whose horrors have lately been exhibited in as fierce a light as ever beat upon a throne. We have all painted in strong colours the vices of the people in whom such general interest is now taken--it is only right that their virtues should be brought into equal prominence on the canvas. To weep with those that weep and rejoice with those that do rejoice is the best system of co-operation as yet invented for the benefit of mankind, and it is the system of co-operation which has long been in vogue among those whom we are pleased to term 'outcasts.' Outcasts many of the abject poor are. They are cast out by Dives to make room for his mansions, his marts, and his manufactories, his railway schemes and his splendid streets, and they are cast out by the stern philosophers who hold that before the march of improvement all who are not fit to survive must shrink back and hide in holes and corners till, in obedience to the law of nature, they pass away and cumber the earth no more. But they are not outcasts to their brethren in misfortune, or to the grade of poor immediately above them.