Ten thousand applicants, eight thousand prisoners, and ten thousand summonses, would probably be a fair average of the humanity that tramps through a London police court in one year. And every social problem, every legal problem, every psychological problem, has its place among that heterogeneous mass. Among this tangled and perplexed humanity I have lived and moved for many years. I have seen it in the prisoners’ rooms, the dock, and the cells. I have seen it at liberty, and have been in touch and communion with it while it has been in prison. In the ten thousand homes of it I have been a constant and not unwelcome visitor, while much of it has visited me in mine. By its dying bed in some great institution, or in some mean room, I have frequently sat. At the mortuary I have been to view some broken remains of it, at the cemetery to see the last of it. So in the remaining chapters of this book I want to tell of humanity, of its good and evil, of its struggles and its failures, of its glory and of its shame--yea, and also of its sufferings and its wrongs. Down, low down, for years I have been groping among it, sometimes blindly, and sometimes with a ray of light, making here and there some rough places plain, and untying now and again some tangled knot; but more often baffled and defeated, yet always learning and ever seeing some new point for good or evil among them. So of this humanity and some of its problems I wish to tell, promising that I shall only speak of ‘that which I know, and testify only to that which I have seen.’ CHAPTER IV HUSBANDS AND WIVES ‘The sight of this domestic misery completely appals me. I can hear no more.’ Mr. Biron had been listening at application time to a number of women who followed each other in quick succession, each bearing an outward and visible sign of the fact that she had been cruelly ill-used. Each woman was a wife, and each one wanted a ‘protection order’ against her husband, until the experienced magistrate, rising from his seat, declared that he could ‘stand it no longer.’