Public opinion boldly expressed never fails to compel the obedience of those who guide the destinies of States. Public opinion is a chorus of voices, and the strength of that chorus depends upon the manner in which each individual member of it exerts his vocal power. How long the scandal which disgraces the age shall continue depends greatly, therefore, good reader, upon your individual exertions. If aught that has been written here, then, has enlisted your sympathy, pass from a recruit to a good soldier of the cause, and help with all your will and all your strength to make so sad a story as this impossible when in future years abler pens than mine shall perhaps once again attempt to tell you HOW THE POOR LIVE. HORRIBLE LONDON.* * Originally published in the Daily News. CHAPTER I. |A great subject, which for years journalists and philanthropists have been vainly endeavouring to interest the general public in, has suddenly by leaps and bounds assumed the front rank in the great army of social and political problems. The housing of the poor has long been a smouldering question; dozens of willing hands have sought to fan it into a flame, but hitherto with small results. At the last moment a little pamphlet laid modestly on the dying embers has done what all the bellows-blowing of the Press failed to accomplish, and the smouldering question has become a brightly-burning one. It is while the flames are still at their height, and everyone is suggesting a remedy, that I should like to say a few words on a subject with which I have been practically and intimately acquainted for many years. It is evident, after reading the many letters which have appeared in the _Daily News_ and other journals, that the great bulk of the remedy-suggesters are writing without the slightest personal knowledge of the people who are to be washed and dressed, rehoused and regenerated, and converted by the State and the Church into wholesome, pleasant, God-fearing citizens of the most approved type. There is a capital picture on the hoardings of London of a little black boy in a bath who has been washed white as far as the neck with Messrs. Somebody's wonderful soap. I do not for one moment dispute the excellent qualities of the moral and political soaps which kindly philanthropists are recommending as likely to accomplish a similar miracle for the Outcast Blackamoors of Horrible London; but I am inclined to think the advocates for these said soaps underestimate the blackness of the boy.