Those who are conscious of what men may be and do cannot be satisfied while the majority of Englishmen live, in the midst of wealthy England, stinted and joyless lives because they are poor. When facts, therefore, such as that referred to by Mr. Bright are stated, no defence is made; and such facts are common. Here are some:--(1) The death-rate among the children of the poor is double that among the children of the rich. Born in some small room, which serves as the sleeping and living room of the family; hushed to sleep by discordant noises from neighbouring factories, refreshed by air laden with smoke and evil odours, forced to find their play in the streets; without country holiday or adequate medical skill, without sufficient air, space, or water, the children die, and the mothers among the poor are always weeping for their children and cannot be comforted. (2) The occupants of the prisons are mostly of one class--the poor. The fact for its explanation needs no assumption that ‘the poor in a lump are bad’; it is the natural result of their condition. It is because children are ill developed or unhealthily developed by life in the streets that they become idlers, sharpers, or thieves. It is because families are crowded together that quarrels begin and end in fights. It is because they have not the means to hide their vices under respectable forms that the poor go to prison and not the rich. (3) The lives of the people are joyless. The slaves of toil, worn by anxiety lest the slavery should end, they have not leisure nor calm for thought; they cannot therefore be happy, living in the thought of other times, as those are happy who, in reading or travel, have gathered memories to be the bliss of solitude, or as those who, ‘by discerning intellect,’ have found the best to be ‘the simple product of the common day.’ When work ceases, the one resource is excitement; and thus their lives are joyless. Anxiety consumes their powers in pleasure as in work, the faces of the women lose their beauty, and a woman of thirty looks old. These are facts patent to those who know our great towns--the facts of life, not among a few of their degraded inhabitants, but facts of the life of the majority of the people. Let any one who does not know how his neighbours live set himself the following sum. Given 20_s._ or 40_s._ a week wages, how to keep a family, pay rent of 2_s._ 6_d._ a week for each room, and lay up an adequate amount for times of bad trade, sickness, and old age. As the sum is worked out, as it is seen how one after another the things which seem to make life worth living have to be given up, and as it is seen how many ‘necessaries’ are impossible, how many of the poor must put up with a diet more scanty than that allowed to paupers, how all must go without the leisure and the knowledge which transmute existence into life--faith will be shaken in many theories of social reform.