large number of those relieved in the winter have been visited, with the result that they have been found apparently in like misery and equally in need of assistance. Of the poverty of those who made application there has been no question. Some may have brought it on themselves by drink or by vice, some may have been thriftless and without self-control; but all were poor, so poor as to be without the things necessary for mere existence. The men and women who crowded the relief offices had haggard and drawn faces, their worn and thin bodies shivered under their rags of clothing, and they gave no sign of strength or of hope. Their homes were squalid, the children ill-fed, ill-clad, and joyless, their record showed that for months they had received no regular wage, and that their substance was more often at the pawnbroker’s than in the home. Last winter’s experience shows that outside the classes of regular wage-earning workmen, who are often included among ‘the poor,’ is a mass of people numbering some tens of thousands who are without the means of living. These are the poor, and their poverty is the common concern. Statistics prove what has long been known to those whose business lies in poor places, and to them the reports of the increased prosperity of the country have been like songs of gladness in a land of sorrow. They know the streets in which every room is a home, the homes in which there is no comfort for the sick, no easy-chair for the weary, no bath for the tired, no fresh air, no means of keeping food, no space for play, no possibility of quiet, and to them the news of the national wealth and the sight of fashionable luxury seem but cruel satire. The little dark rooms may bear traces of the man’s struggle or of the woman’s patience, but the homes of the poor are sad, like the fields of lost battles, where heroism has fought in vain. By no struggle and by no patience can health be won in so few feet of cubic air, and no parent dares to hope that he can make the time of youth so joyful as to for ever hold his children to pleasures which are pure. The homes of the poor are a mockery of the name, but yet how many would think themselves happy if even such homes were secure, and if they were able to look to the future without seeing starvation for their children and the workhouse for themselves! One example will illustrate many. The Browns are a family of five; they occupy one room. The man is a labourer, London-born, quick-witted and slow-bodied, and, as many labourers do, he fills up slack time with hawking; the woman takes in her neighbours’ washing. Their room, twelve feet by ten feet, is crowded with two bedsteads, the implements for washing, the coal-bin, a table, a chest, and a few chairs; on the walls are some pictures, the human protest against the doctrine that the poor can ‘live by bread alone.’ The man earns sometimes 3_s._, often nothing, in the day; and his wife brings in sometimes 6_d._ or 9_d._ a day, but her work fills