We have spoken of station and order. It must be remembered that there was then no pretence of a clerk, or any one of that kind, calling himself a gentleman. Steele, however, notes the attempts made by small people to dub themselves esquire, and says we shall soon be a nation of _armigeri_. The Georgian clerk was a servant--the servant of his master, and a very faithful servant, too, for the most part. His services were rewarded at a rate of pay varying from £20 to £100 a year. A clerk in a Government office seldom got more than £50, but some of them had chances of a kind which we now call dishonest. In other words, they took perquisites, commissions, considerations, and bribes. I have said, elsewhere, that the London craftsman sank about this time to the lowest level he has ever reached. In the City itself, as we have seen, he was carefully looked after. Each little parish consisted of two or three streets, where every resident was well known. But already the narrow bounds of the Freedom had pushed out the people more and more. The masters--the merchants and retailers--still remained; those who were pushed out were the craftsmen. When they left the City they not only left the parish where all were friends--all, at least, belonging to the same ship's crew; where there was a kindly feeling towards the poor; where the boys and girls were taught the ways of virtue and the Catechism--they left the company, to which they were no longer apprenticed, and which became nothing but a rich company of masters or men unconnected with the trade; they left the Church; they left the school; they left all the charities, helps, encouragements which had formerly belonged to them. They went to Whitechapel, to St. Katherine's Precinct, to Spital Fields, to Clerkenwell. They lived by themselves, knowing no law except the law of necessity, and they drank--drank--drank. No energetic vicar, no active young curate, no deaconess, no Sister, no Bible-woman ventured among them. They went forth in the morning to their work, and in the evening they returned home to their dens. We read about these people in Fielding, Smollett, Colquhoun, Eden, and others; we see what they were like in Hogarth. Their very brutality rendered them harmless. Had they been a little less brutal, a little more intelligent--had they been like the lower sort of Parisian, there might have been a revolution in this country with brutalities as bad as any that marked the first act in that great drama played between 1792 and 1815. [Illustration: SIR JOHN FIELDING'S COURT, BOW STREET]