Even at the risk of being pronounced unpatriotic, I shall, therefore, maintain my contention that the greatest blessing of the poor is the hospital--that noble institution of which Englishmen of all classes and all creeds may reasonably be proud. Sickness, disease, and accident enter very largely into the annals of the poor. Overcrowding and unsanitary dwellings--all the ghastly surroundings of poor life in a great city, which I have attempted feebly to describe in this book--render the masses peculiarly susceptible to illness in every shape and form. Epidemics of some sort or other are rarely absent from the poorer districts, and many painful diseases and deformities are transmitted regularly from parent to child. To be sound of limb and well in health in these dens is bad enough, but the existence of an invalid under such circumstances is pitiable to a degree. The hospitals are the heavens-upon-earth of the poor. I have heard little children--their poor pinched faces wrinkled with pain--murmur that they didn't mind it, because if they had been well they would never have come to 'the beautiful place.' Beautiful, indeed, by contrast with their wretched homes are the clean wards, the comfortable beds, and the kind faces of the nurses. Step across from the home of a sick child in the slums of the Borough to the Evelina Hospital, and it is like passing from the infernal regions to Paradise. To this noble charity little sufferers are often brought dirty, neglected, starving; and even the nurses, used as they are to such sights, will tell you their hearts ache at the depth of baby wretchedness revealed in some of the cases brought to them. Passing from cot to cot, and hearing the histories of the little ones lying there so clean, and, in spite of their suffering, so happy, one is inclined to think that the charity is a mistake--that to nurse these children back to health only to send them again to their wretched homes is a species of refined cruelty. It were better in dozens of cases that the children were left to die now, while they are young and innocent, than that death should be wrestled with and its prize torn from it only to be cast back into a state of existence which is worse than death. The children have some dim inkling of this themselves. Many of them cry when they are well, and cling to the kind nurses, asking piteously not to be sent back to the squalor and dirt, and often, alas! cruelty, from which they have been snatched for a brief spell.