These cases are fair samples of the class of people we call the abject poor, people who will not go to the workhouse under any circumstances, and who are at present herding together in the rookeries we are all agreed must be demolished and replaced by something better. Add to them the people carrying on objectionable trades in one or two rooms--and who must carry them on to live wherever they go--and the reformers will have a fair idea of the tenants for whom houses must be provided somewhere, if their present dwellings are to be pulled down. At the first glance it seems almost impossible to cater for them. Fancy turning these people into nice clean rooms and expecting five per cent, for your money! Besides, putting their habits on one side, they are never sure of regular work. They may pay the rent one week and be penniless the next. Then five per cent, philanthropy must turn them out, having given them a glimpse of Paradise which will make the return to Hades a terrible trial to those who have had their better instincts aroused. Whichever way we look at the subject, it is fraught with difficulties, and if we are challenged to find a remedy, we have to go into a question which thousands of excellent people refuse altogether to discuss. The deserving poor could all be better housed now without a single brick being laid or a single Act of Parliament passed, if they had fewer children. Even in the slums the rents are lower and the rooms better for couples who have only two children. In dozens of instances where I have asked the denizens of these hovels why they pay four and five shillings for such vile accommodation, the answer is, 'They won't take us in a decent place because of the children.' I know a case now of a man who took a house for himself and family, and found he had two rooms to spare. The house was clean and healthy, and he had dozens of applications from would-be lodgers. But, though he was poor--and the extra rent would have been a godsend to him--he remained unlet for four months because all the applicants had three or four children. His case is the case of hundreds of people who have decent rooms to let for the labouring poor. The large families these people invariably have not only keep them in grinding poverty all their lives, but the overpopulation floods the labour market and keeps the scale of wages down to starvation point. While supply so enormously exceeds demand, how can any market be in a healthy condition? Men and women, and boys and girls, all eager for something to do, are to be had by thousands, and labour is at a discount. If the supply diminished, and hands were more in proportion to the work to be done, labour would be at a premium.