The overcrowded homes of the poor compel the children to witness everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them. Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with hunger because they had no breakfast, and not sure whether they would even secure a dry crust for dinner when their morning's quantum of education had been duly imparted. Children thus hungered, thus housed, and thus left to grow up as best they can without being fathered or mothered, are not, educate them as you will, exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the Empire. What, then, is the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the new generation will be better than their elders? To me it seems that the truth is rather the other way. The lawlessness of our lads the increased license of our girls, the general shiftlessness from the home-making point of view of the product of our factories and schools are far from reassuring. Our young people have never learned to obey. The fighting gangs of half-grown lads in Lisson Grove, and the scuttlers of Manchester are ugly symptoms of a social condition that will not grow better by being left alone. It is the home that has been destroyed, and with the home the home-like virtues. It is the dis-homed multitude, nomadic, hungry that is rearing an undisciplined population, cursed from birth with hereditary weakness of body and hereditary faults of character. It is idle to hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in barracks. A child brought up in an institution is too often only half-human, having never known a mother's love and a father's care. To men and women who are without homes children must be more or less of an incumbrance. Their advent is regarded with impatience, and often it is averted by crime. The unwelcome little stranger is badly cared for, badly fed, and allowed every chance to die. Nothing is worth doing to increase his chances of living that does not Reconstitute the Home. But between us and that ideal how vast is the gulf! It will have to be bridged, however, if anything practical is to be done. CHAPTER 9. IS THERE NO HELP?