Statistics can give you no conception of this crowding. If you refer to the results of the last census, you find the average population _per_ house, in the City of London Union to be 7·1; in the East and West London Unions, 8·8; for the construction of these averages, the most dissimilar materials are blended together; and the density of population is apparently reduced by the very large number of business-houses which have no resident inmates, beyond the porter or the housekeeper who has charge of them. If you turn from the deceptions of an average to the exact analysis of detail, you will find many single rooms in the City with a larger number of inmates than you might otherwise ascribe to entire houses. Instances are innumerable, in which a single room is occupied by a whole family--whatever may be its number, and whatever the ages and sexes of the children; where birth and death go on side by side; where the mother in travail, or the child with small-pox, or the corpse waiting interment, has no separation from the rest. This is evil enough; but worse remains behind. It is no uncommon thing, in a room of twelve feet square or less, to find three or four families _styed_ together (perhaps with infectious disease among them) filling the same space night and day--men, women, and children, in the promiscuous intimacy of cattle.[59] Of these inmates it is nearly superfluous to observe, that in all offices of nature they are gregarious and public; that every instinct of personal or sexual decency is stifled; that every nakedness of life is uncovered there. Such an apartment is commonly hired in the first instance by a single pair, who sub-let a participation in the shelter, probably to as many others as apply. Sometimes a noxious occupation is carried on within the space: thus, I have seen mud-larks (_chiffonniers_) sitting on the floor with baskets of filth before them, sorting out the occasional bit of coal or bone, from a heterogeneous collection made along the bed of the river, or in the mouths of the sewers; and this in a small room, inhabited night and day by such a population as I have described.