foreign meat, ticketed English--bits of mutton and shreds of beef on which the wind has blown. On them the dust and dirt of the street has found a resting-place; flies have paid them a visit; dirty fingers of other speculative purchasers have turned them over again and again. She finds her coppers, gets one pound and a half of the pieces, and takes them to her own home--her one room, her larder and bedroom, workshop and kitchen, in which the whole family sleeps--and on the Sunday makes an inviting stew. But there are plenty who fare worse than this, and to whom even the ‘pieces’ would be a Godsend, to whom even a bit of ‘macadamized cheese’ would represent luxury, and whose children from very birth are fed with material that would test the stomach of a dog or an ostrich. Can this go on, and the nation be free from the penalty? Impossible! and the penalty is paid all round. Now, I have no wish for all difficulties to be removed from the lives even of the poor. Life without difficulty would be a poor thing, and hardly worth the living. But I do claim that the poorest, the hardest worked of all London’s toilers, should have the possibility of living in decency, cleanliness, and some degree of comfort, and be able to obtain clean and nourishing food. And it can be done--I know it can be done. But it can only be by organization and combination, without which it will be for ever impossible for the Home Workers to get value for their money. I have had glimpses of a promised land, and in my fancy have seen the Home Workers organized and living in sweet content--organized not for strikes or lock-outs, but for health, virtue, happiness; not in filthy slums enveloped with rank odours and moral and physical corruption; near the town, but a little way out, where the free air of heaven can enter their lungs and the silence of the country speak to them; in their communities, where each family had its suite of rooms, and each suite of rooms its bath-room; where children had rounded limbs and merry hearts; where brave boyhood and sweet girlhood ripened and matured; where poor women hovered not at midnight for scraps of dirty meat, and where the miserable items--tea, ½d.; sugar, ½d.--were no longer known, for they had their own stores. Some day we shall enter this promised land in which the jerry-builder shall not enter, and in which nothing that is unclean or maketh a lie shall be found. And when we enter it we shall hear the deep roar of the nation as it rolls its heavy curse on the buried past. We shall feel that the heart of England is lighter, the hand of the oppressor has been stayed. Then the mothers of England will buy clothing for their darlings without fear. No nameless terrors will haunt the dainty brush, neither will men or women’s clothing convey contagion, or the smart necktie disseminate the seeds of death.