One London slum is very like another, but for my purpose now I will select a district in Southwark, where the houses are in such a condition that they are bound to come down under any scheme of sanitary improvement, however halfhearted it may be. We enter a narrow court, picking our way with caution over the nameless filth and garbage and the decaying vegetable matter that, flung originally in heaps outside the doors, has been trodden about by the feet of the inhabitants until the broken flags are almost undiscernible beneath a thick paste of indescribable filth. The outside of the houses prepares us for what is to come. Inside them we find the staircases rotten and breaking away. A greasy cord stretched from flight to flight is often the sole protection they possess. Wooden rails there may originally have been, but the landlord has not replaced them. He does not supply his tenants with firewood gratis. The windows are broken and patched with paper, or occasionally with a bit of board. The roofs are dilapidated, and the wet of a rainy season has soaked through the loose tiles, and saturated the walls and ceilings from attic to basement. And the rooms themselves! To describe them with anything like truth taxes my knowledge of euphemisms to the utmost. The rooms in these houses are pigsties, and nothing more, and in them men, women and children live and sleep and eat. More I cannot say, except that the stranger, entering one of these rooms for the first time, has every sense shocked, and finds it almost impossible to breathe the pestilent atmosphere without being instantly sick. And in such rooms as these there are men and women now living who never leave them for days and weeks together. They are sometimes discovered in an absolute state of nudity, having parted with every rag in their possession in order to keep body and soul together through times when no work is to be had. So much for the district which is to be levelled, and the general habits of the inhabitants who are to be 'rehoused.' Let us take a few of the families who will have to be somebody's tenants under any scheme, and see what their circumstances are. The cases are all selected from the district I have endeavoured to hint at above. I will begin with the workers: T. Harborne, stonemason, occupies two dilapidated rooms, which are in a filthy condition. Has five children. Total weekly income through slackness, 8s. Rent, 4s. 6d. E. Williams, costermonger, two rooms in a court which is a hotbed of vice and disease. Has eight children. Total earnings, 17s. Rent, 5s. 6d. T. Briggs, labourer, one room, four children. Rent, 4s. No furniture; all sleep on floor. Daughter answered knock, absolutely naked; ran in and covered herself with a sack. Mrs. Johnson, widow, one room, three children. Earnings, 6s. Rent, 3s. 6d. W. Leigh, fancy boxmaker, two awful rooms, four children. Earnings, 14s. Rent, 6s. H. Walker, hawker, two rooms, seven children. Earnings, 10s. Rent, 5s. 6d.