From such a scene as I am going to ask you to witness, thousands who crowd a theatre nightly to see a woman's head battered out against a sofa, or a young man suffocate himself with the fumes of charcoal, would shrink back in disgust. But you will not, for if you have gone so far with us as this journey, you are, I feel sure, convinced that no good can come of hiding the worst phase of a question which is only dragged forward here that it may, by the very horror of its surroundings, arrest attention and so secure that discussion which must always precede a great scheme of reformation. Come with me to this place. Our way lies through Clare Market, so don't go alone, for it is a dangerous neighbourhood to strangers. Come with me through strange sights and sounds, past draggled, tipsy women crowding the footway, and hulking fellows whose blasphemies fill the tainted air; pick your way carefully through the garbage and filth that litter the streets, and stop in this narrow thoroughfare which is but a stone's-throw from many a stage that holds the mirror up to nature, and yet would shrink from holding such a scene as this. We have stopped at a marine-store shop--we enter the passage and find our way up to the third floor. Here in a single room live a man, his wife, and three children. There has been an inquest on a baby who has died--poisoned by the awful atmosphere it breathed. We have stumbled up the dark crazy staircase at the risk of our limbs, to see this room in which the family live and sleep and eat, because in its way it is a curiosity. It has been the scene of an incident which one would hardly believe possible in this Christian country. For days in this foul room the body of a dead baby had to lie because the parish had no mortuary. Not only did the corpse have to lie here for days among the living, but on that little table, propped against the window, the surgeon had to perform a post-mortem examination. Think of it, you who cry out that the sufferings of these people are sensationally exaggerated--the dead baby was cut open in the one room where the mother and the other little ones, its brothers and sisters, lived and ate and slept. And why? Because the parish had no mortuary, and no room in which post-mortems could be performed. The jurymen who went to view the body sickened at the frightful exhalations of this death-trap, and one who had thirty years' experience of London said never had he seen a fouler den. I have turned to the newspapers for a report of the inquest and found it, and I think it will be better to present it word for word. It is an ordinary newspaper report of what has happened and been legally investigated, and may carry conviction where my own unsupported testimony would fail: