Most of the English girls to be seen at night in Oxford Street and the Strand, to say nothing of their even more degraded sisters in Whitechapel, are, or have been, tailoresses. How these poor creatures manage to exist at all, even when they eke out their wretched earnings by the price paid for their dishonour, it is not easy to see. The key of the mystery is to be found in their mutual help of one another. Even amid all their degradation and shame, many of them retain that divine instinct of self-sacrifice which in all ages has been the noblest part of womanhood. Dim it may be and undeveloped, but still it is there, evidenced daily by many little acts of kindness, many little generous deeds towards those who are more miserable and more suffering than themselves. "It is mostly the poor who help the poor." I will go further and say, it is mostly the wretched who help the wretched, for between them exists that intimate knowledge of each other's sorrows which is the truest bond of sympathy. Under happier circumstances these poor women might have lived honest and virtuous lives. As it is, they have to work side by side with men of all nationalities, under unhealthy and objectionable conditions--conditions subservient of all sense of decency. This, combined with the utterly inadequate wage, naturally leads to immorality, with its attendant satellites of drunkenness, disease, and death. Thus the burden of wretchedness and crime goes on, ever increasing in volume and intensity. How can it be otherwise when the ranks of the lost in our large cities, are thus being continually recruited from within and from without? Every now and then the public conscience is startled by the news of some awful tragedy--some poor creature done to her death in Whitechapel. It is but a bubble bursting on the surface, which oozes up from the black depths of vice and misery beneath. One of the most potent causes of this vice and misery is undoubtedly the unlimited pouring in of destitute and objectionable foreigners. Again I ask, Can nothing be done to rescue these women--our sisters--from the attendant horrors of this fierce and degrading foreign competition? Can nothing be done to place the price of their labour upon such a level as to enable them by honest work to lead virtuous and happy lives? _Usque quo Domine?_ Lord, how long? Such is the bitter cry of the workwomen in East London. CHAPTER VII. THE SANITARY DANGER.