In one great workhouse, for example, we find that the finest butter, the best Irish bacon, the whitest bread, the most expensive cuts of beef are for the pauper. Outside the workhouse the working head of a family who is struggling to bring up his children in honourable independence has none of these luxuries. In place of the best butter, he and his family have the cheapest margarine or dripping; their bacon, if they have any, is bought in inferior scraps; their bread is of common description, and instead of costly cuts of beef, they too often have to content themselves with the cheapest form of food in London--fried fish. At no time have they too much of even this food. Yet, while they are existing in such pinching poverty, fighting their way from day to day and from hour to hour, an enormous tax is levied on them in the form of rates, to maintain in unnecessary comfort those who are living an idle and unprofitable life. The contrast to the worker must seem poignant. On the one side of the workhouse gate are poverty and incessant misery, with insufficient food to eat. On the other side are warmth and light, complete freedom from care, and abundance of food to eat, with no necessity whatever to earn the day’s food by labour. All the prizes are to the unfit; all the effort and misery are to the laborious. If the honourable working man loses his employment through some change in industrial organization or through the growth of foreign competition, he finds it too often impossible to struggle back to his feet. He sees the help which might have carried him through his misfortune diverted by the blatant outcries of the worthless. He must be content to suffer and die in proud silence, while those who have never done or wished to do an honest day’s work absorb the contributions of public and private charity. Mr. McKenzie, to whom I am indebted for so many illuminating facts, completes the picture in a few vivid paragraphs. He takes the huge and poverty-stricken London district of Poplar for his text, and he tells us-- “Had the Poplar poor law authorities contented themselves with dealing adequately with the old and the sick, and the maimed who are among them, all their resources would have been taxed, for the district is now very, very poor. They went further. They deliberately attracted to themselves the great shifting army of loafers and of idlers from all parts of London. “How has this been done? By two means. Outdoor relief has been freely granted to all kinds of folk, and the people inside the workhouse have been treated in a sumptuous manner far above the style of their class.