I knew a lady whose husband had turned out worthless, and who finally deserted her. Her one source of income was a row of small houses in the East End of London, houses that were let out in rooms to the very poor. My friend was too poor to employ an agent to collect her rents and draw a commission for his work. Every week she did so herself, and one week she invited me to accompany her. I did so, and it was the most horrible day I ever spent. No working man in a district such as this can form any idea of the filth and misery in which the lost, degraded tenants of these houses lived. I shall not attempt to describe it, for it would be a poor return for your kindness in coming here to-night to rob you of your night’s rest! I will merely quote some lines written by Mr. F. A. McKenzie, one of the foremost sociologists of the day. They deal with the lives of the Unemployed in the East End of London, and they are guarded, reticent words. I read-- “To say that scores of thousands of them are facing the coming winter with fear and dread is but mildly to imply their situation. They are the derelicts of London, whom the changes in modern conditions have left hopelessly behind. Without crafts, without knowledge, many of them with hope dead, they face a future that good trade can do little to relieve, and bad trade must greatly darken.” “The prodigal son” of to-day plays out the last act of his tragedy, not before a fatted calf, but in a Poplar back room. The shiftless and incapables, attracted by low rent, by the chance of casual work, and by the abundance of relief, drift here. To them are added the scores of thousands of locally born people who are trained in such a way that they cannot be anything else than casuals. The very streets proclaim the lives of these people. Apart from the main thoroughfares and from certain more prosperous avenues, you are swallowed up in an endless succession of long roads of cheaply built houses. The walls are crumbling, and the bricks seem as though they would fall at a blow; many houses have broken, paper-stuffed windows; there are whole streets where the doors and windows have not seen paint for a generation. The children, babies with ophthalmic eyes, girls dirty beyond belief play in the gutters. The women gossip at the doors. The men, strong, yet none wanting their strength, lounge at street corners. In home after home you will find that the sole regular wage earned is by a young son, who obtains ten shillings a week as errand boy in the City. On this, with occasional additions from the others, the whole family exists. The mother may obtain a few shillings a week at ‘charing,’ although such work is scarce in Poplar.