We live in a country which practically protects the poor and oppressed of every land under the sun at the expense of its own. We organize great military expeditions, we pour out blood and money _ad libitum_ in order to raise the social condition of black men and brown; the woes of an Egyptian, or a Bulgarian, or a Zulu send a thrill of indignation through honest John Bull's veins; and yet at his very door there is a race so oppressed, so hampered, and so utterly neglected, that its condition has become a national scandal. Is it not time that the long-promised era of domestic legislation gave some faint streaks of dawn in the parliamentary sky? Are we to wait for a revolution before we rescue the poor from the clutches of their oppressors? Are we to wait for the cholera or the plague before we remedy a condition of things which sanitarily is without parallel in civilized countries? There is a penalty for packing cattle too closely together; why should there be none for improperly packing men and women and children? The law says that no child shall grow up without reading, writing, and arithmetic; but the law does nothing that children may have air, and light, and shelter. No one urges that the State should be a grandmother to the citizens, but it should certainly exercise ordinary parental care over its family. To quote an instance of the gross neglect of the interests of the poor by the State, take the working of the Artisans' Dwellings Act. Space after space has been cleared under the provisions of this Act, thousands upon thousands of families have been rendered homeless by the demolition of whole acres of the slums where they hid their heads, and in scores of instances the work of improvement has stopped with the pulling down. To this day the cleared spaces stand empty--a cemetery for cats, a last resting-place for worn-out boots and tea-kettles. The consequence of this is, that the hardships of the displaced families have been increased a hundredfold. So limited is now the accommodation for the class whose wage-earning power is of the smallest, that in the few quarters left open to them rents have gone up 100 per cent. in five years--a room which once let for 2s. a week is now 4s. Worse even than this--the limited accommodation has left the renters helpless victims of any extortion or neglect the landlords of these places may choose to practise.