How are those shillings spent? Again I say, come and see; for here is the housekeeping account of another widow living in the same neighbourhood, a blouse-maker. She had four children--a girl of twelve, a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger child. The girl, who was, of course, deputy mother, had been charged with stealing some food, which undoubtedly she took to give to her younger brothers. In my visitations I came across the widow’s rent-book--five shillings weekly. Paid up to date. I found her wage-book with its pitiful tale of hard work and poor pay. I saw also the widow’s housekeeping account and her expenditure of her last shilling. Here it is: ‘Tea, ½d.; sugar, ½d.; bread, 1¼d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1d.; firewood, ½d.; and a bit of bacon.’ When this story appeared in the press, I received 1,600 letters in a few days about the widow and her children, and England seemed to weep over them. By the aid of the _Daily Telegraph_ we were enabled to open five banking accounts, and place them above the fear of poverty. But when that fear was gone, when the cupboard was full of good food for which the children no longer cried, the youngest boy died, for even a banking account could not save him. And so it happened that a kind-hearted public clothed the family in mourning, paid the undertaker’s bill and cemetery fees. Will the dark path of the destroyer ever prove a way of light to a social heaven? Some day, perhaps, when we have suffered more. But to return to that widow’s housekeeping account. A notable business man said to me: ‘Do you know what strikes me most about that widow’s housekeeping account?’ I supposed the poverty of it. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It is the horrible and senseless waste it tells of! Do you suppose she gets a halfpennyworth of tea or sugar, or a pennyworth of margarine for her money? No. She loses on every purchase; she is bound to. The shopkeeper can’t lose, so she must. Multiply the loss on that shilling by the number of shillings spent in a year. Why, it is frightful!’ He went to the root of the matter at once. The poorer people are, the greater the cost of living; the more abject their poverty, and the greater their need of nourishing food, the dearer they have to pay for the barest necessities. Come into a marketing street in a poor neighbourhood toward midnight on Saturday, watch the butchers’ shops, and you will see a poorly-clothed and miserable woman standing looking with wistful eyes at the meat. With a few hardly-earned coppers she has to provide some pretence of a Sunday dinner for her family. The joints are ticketed, and they are beyond even her dreams. She comes nearer and looks at the inferior pieces, and timidly inquires the price. Still too high. She looks again and again, until the butcher says, and not unkindly, ‘Buy some of those nice pieces, ma’am?’ Nice pieces! they have lain on the block all day, after being trimmed off