Can one blame them if, knowing their hard lot and the little reward the most virtuous life can bring them, they sink into the temptations spread around them? Remember that, for half their miseries, half their illness and premature decay, and much of the disease which cripples and carries off their children, the shameful way in which they are housed, and the callous neglect of their rights as citizens by the governing class, is responsible. They are handicapped in the race from start to finish. And, under these circumstance, such charity, such humanity, and such patience and long-suffering, as exist among them, are indeed worthy of admiration. The natural instinct of man is to evil, and when I read in little tracts and clerical addresses of the awful depravity of the 'heathen in our midst,' I am tempted to ask what the reverend gentlemen and shocked philanthropists expect. I say, with a full knowledge of their surroundings, that the lower classes of our great cities are entitled to the highest credit for not being twenty times more depraved than they are. They are a class which contains the germs of all that goes to make up good citizenship, and the best proof of it is the patience with which they endure the systematic neglect of their more fortunate fellow-countrymen. In any other land but ours, the mighty mass of helots would long ago have broken their bonds and swept over the land in vast revolutionary hordes. They did not always know their power, and had not enough knowledge to appreciate their wrongs. Education is opening their eyes, and their lips will not be slow to express their new-born sentiments. It will be well to meet the movement half-way, and yield to them that reform and humane recognition which some day they may all too noisily demand. Here am I up on a platform and thumping away at the table and spouting what I have no doubt many excellent persons will think is rank communism, though it is nothing of the sort. _Peccavi_, I apologize. The fumes of the misery I have passed through the last two months have got into my head and made me talk wildly. Let me resume my labour more in the character of a missionary or special correspondent, and leave oratory and denunciation to the Sunday morning Wilkeses of Battersea Park. We have no business out-of-doors at all--let us study another domestic interior. The scene, a street which lies cheek by jowl with the quarter where the world of fashion rolls nightly in comfortable carriages to enjoy theatrical and operatic performances in half-guinea stalls and three-guinea boxes, and where fabulous fortunes are made by those who can make Mr. and Mrs. Dives weep at imaginary woes or laugh at a merry jest or comic antic.