The first great work of the reformers in all their schemes must be to separate the labouring from the criminal classes. At present both classes herd together, to the infinite harm of the former; and the poor artisan's children grow up with every form of crime and vice practised openly before their eyes. The pulling down of vast areas of labouring-class accommodation to make way for Metropolitan improvements is the cause of this commingling of the honest poor with their dishonest brethren. The men and women earning low wages and precarious livelihoods have been driven step by step into the Alsatias of London, because nowhere else have they been able to find shelter. The suburbs are beyond their means, not because of the rents, but because of the expense of getting to and from their daily work. Take the case of the thousands of the labouring poor who get employment at the docks. Their only chance of being taken on is to be at the dock-gates by four or five in the morning. Many of them are there as early as three. How could these men get from the suburbs at such an hour, and how could they afford the daily railway fare? Then there are the factory hands, and the men and women and children who work at home for the City houses--they too must be within walking-distance of the factories and warehouses. At present their only chance is to live in the rookeries, and there they must pay from two-and-sixpence to four shillings for a single room. And without exception all these rookeries are largely peopled by the criminal classes, who find their security in the surrounding filth and lawlessness, which are so many fortifications against the enemy. The criminal classes will oppose all efforts at their redemption, the labouring classes will welcome them, so that, to get a good result quickly, the latter must be the first consideration with politicians, whatever the religious view of the subject may be. Having separated the criminals from the workers, the next task must be to separate the old from the young, in planning out measures of reform and applying remedies. The condition of many of the older people, even among the poorer workers, is almost hopeless. They could never adapt themselves now to the life the philanthropist dreams for them. They could not be brought to see that marriage is any better than cohabitation, that thrift is a virtue, or that there is any higher pleasure in life than the gratification of the animal instincts. To gratify intellectual instincts, men must have intellects trained and cultivated to gratify. The older denizens of Horrible London have had their intellects dulled rather than sharpened by long years of familiarity with want, privation, and wretched surroundings. They have lived come-day, go-day, God-send-Sunday lives too long to be suddenly awakened to a taste for intellectual amusements or to higher aspirations; and, what is more, the bulk of the class I allude to are absolutely ignorant, and can neither read nor write.