And yet we all know that the rates are very heavy, and that the struggling poor are cruelly handicapped to keep the idle, the old, the young, the sick. We have all read of the culpable extravagance and dishonest waste which goes on behind the high walls of the palatial institutions governed by the “guardians,” who should be the guardians of the public purse as well as of the helpless poor. The village built for the children of the Bermondsey Union has cost over £320 per bed, and last year each child kept there cost £1 0s. 6½d. per week. It is said that the porcelain baths provided for the children of the Mile End Union were priced at from £18 to £20 each, while it is stated that the cost of erecting and equipping the pauper village for the children chargeable to the Liverpool Select Vestry worked out at £330 per inmate. For England and Wales the pauper bill was in 1905 £13,851,981, or £15 13s. 3¼d. for each pauper. And are we satisfied with what we are purchasing with the money? Is even the Socialist content with the giant workhouses--“’Omes of rest for them as is tired of working,” as a tourist tram-conductor described the Brighton Workhouse? With the children’s pauper villages composed of electrically-lit villa residences? With the huge barrack schools, oppressively clean and orderly, where many apparatus for domestic labour-saving are considered suitable for training girls to be workmen’s wives? Are we, as Londoners, proud to reply to the intelligent foreigner that the magnificent building occupying one of the best and most expensive sites on a main thoroughfare of West London is the “rubbish heap of humanity,” where, cast among enervating surroundings, a full stop is put to any effortful progress for character building? No; and I know I shall find an echo of that emphatic “No” in the heart of each of my hearers. We, as Christians, are _not_ satisfied with the treatment of our dependent poor. The spirit of repression which was paramount before Elizabeth’s time is with us still; the spirit of humanitarianism which arose in her great reign is with us still; but both have taken the form of institutionalism, and with that no one who believes in the value of the individual can be rightfully satisfied; for while the body is pampered no demands are made on the soul, no calls for achievement, for conquest of bad tendencies or idle habits. Broadly speaking, the repression policy failed because it was not humanitarian; the humanitarian policy failed because it was not scientific; the scientific policy is failing because by institutionalism individualism is crushed out. What is it we want? There is discontent among the thoughtful who observe; discontent among the workers who pay; discontent among the paupers who receive. But discontent is barren unless married to ideals, and they must be founded on principles. May I suggest one?