In the early part of the present year I spent some two months in visiting the worst slums of London, and in investigating the condition of the inhabitants. I not only went from cellar to attic, but I traced back the family history of many of the occupants. I followed the workers to their work, the thieves and wantons to their haunts, the children to their schools, and the homeless loafers to the holes and corners, the open passages and backyards where they herded together at night. I began my task with a light heart; I finished it with a heavy one. In that two months I saw a vision of hell more terrible than the immortal Florentine's, and this was no poet's dream--it was a terrible truth, ghastly in its reality, heartbreaking in its intensity, and the doom of the imprisoned bodies in this modern Inferno was as horrible as any that Dante depicted for his tortured souls. But the most terrible thing of all was that the case of many of these lost creatures seemed utterly hopeless. I felt this then, and, now that the Press has been flooded with suggestions, I feel it still. In writing this I trust I shall not be misunderstood. I have only ventured to intrude myself in this great discussion now to point out where I think the new forces set in motion may be most profitably employed and where they would simply be wasted. We must remember that it is not only poverty we have to deal with in order to metamorphose Horrible London into a new Arcadia--we have to do battle with a hydra-headed monster called Vice, and vice is born and bred in tens of thousands of these outcasts, whose lot we are trying to remedy. It taints the entire atmosphere of the slums. The people I refer to are dirty and foul and vicious, as tigers are fierce and vindictive and cruel, because it is part of their nature. Take them from their dirt to-morrow, and put them in clean rooms amid wholesome surroundings, and what would be the result?--the dirty people would not be improved, but the clean rooms would be dirtied. You cannot stamp out the result of generations of neglect in a day, or a week, or a year, any more than you can check the ravages of consumption with doses of cough mixture; whether you give it to the patient a tablespoonful or a tumblerful at a time, once an hour or once a week, the result will be the same.