Wherever there is an institution, a reading-room, a club, or a playground there is work for volunteers. It may not be that the volunteers will seem to do much; they will be certain to do something. They will be certain to make links between the classes, and lead both rich and poor to give up habits which keep them apart. They will be certain to add strength to the public opinion, which by the bye will relieve those whose higher life is destroyed by excess or by want. They will be certain to do something, and if they carry into their work a spirit of devotion, a faith in the high calling of the human race, and a love for its weakest members, there is no limit which can be placed on what they will do. They will put into the sound body the sound mind; into the well-ordered town citizens who ‘feel deep, think clear, and bear fruit well.’ SAMUEL A. BARNETT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ V. _‘AT HOME’ TO THE POOR._[1] [1] Reprinted, by permission, from the _Cornhill Magazine_ of May 1881. Few people realise the extreme dulness of the lives of the poor. Cut off from the many interests which education or the possession of money gives, they have little left but the ‘trivial round, the common task,’ which indeed furnishes them with ‘room to deny themselves,’ but is hardly, in their case at least, ‘the road to bring them daily nearer God.’ ‘People must be amuthed,’ is the caricatured statement of a true human need, and the terrible and often deplored attraction of the public-house has its root not so much in the love of strong drink as in the want of interest and desire for amusement felt by the lower classes of the poor. This is especially true with regard to the women and to those men who cannot read. Unable to comprehend the ever-living interest of watching public affairs, prevented by ignorance from following, even in outline, the actions of the nations, they are thrown back on the affairs of their neighbours, and centre all their interest in the sayings and doings of quarrelsome Mr. Jones or much-abused Mrs. Smith.