Of those returned as homeless and starving, 870,000 were in receipt of outdoor relief. To these must be added the inmates of our prisons. In 1889 174,779 persons were received in the prisons, but the average number in prison at any one time did not exceed 60,000. The figures, as given in the Prison Returns, are as follows: -- In Convict Prisons .. .. .. .. .. 11,600 In Local Prisons.. .. .. .. .. .. 20,883 In Reformatories.. .. .. .. .. .. 1,270 In Industrial Schools .. .. .. .. 21,413 Criminal Lunatics .. .. .. .. .. 910 ------- 56,136 Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding criminals) 78,966--and we have an army of nearly two million: belonging to the submerged classes. To this there must be added at the very least, another million, representing those dependent upon the criminal, lunatic and other classes, not enumerated here, and the more or less helpless of the class immediately above the houseless and starving. This brings my total to three millions, or, to put it roughly to one-tenth of the population. According to Lord Brabazon and Mr. Samuel Smith, "between two and three millions of our population are always pauperised and degraded." Mr. Chamberlain says there is a "population equal to that of the metropolis,--that is, between four and five millions--"which has remained constantly in a state of abject destitution and misery." Mr. Giffen is more moderate. The submerged class, according to him, comprises one in five of manual labourers, six in 100 of the population. Mr. Giffen does not add the third million which is living on the border line. Between Mr Chamberlain's four millions and a half, and Mr. Giffen's 1,800,000 I am content to take three millions as representing the total strength of the destitute army. Darkest England, then, may be said to have a population about equal to that of Scotland. Three million men, women, and children a vast despairing multitude in a condition nominally free, but really enslaved;--these it is whom we have to save. It is a large order. England emancipated her negroes sixty years ago, at a cost of #40,000,000, and has never ceased boasting about it since. But at our own doors, from "Plymouth to Peterhead," stretches this waste Continent of humanity--three million human beings who are enslaved--some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian overseer, all of them to destitution and despair? Is anything to be done with them? Can anything be done for them? Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as insoluble as that of the London sewage, which, feculent and festering, swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and flow of the tide?