If a life of honest labour has no better reward to offer than the meagre wages and attendant horrors of the sweaters' dens, can it be wondered if in despair of earning an honest livelihood, hundreds, nay thousands, of our people are tempted to abandon the unequal struggle, and to drift into idleness, drunkenness, and vice? I have endeavoured to show in a previous chapter how this unnatural competition forces Englishwomen upon the streets; but that, alas! is not the only resultant form of vice. A great social reformer[23] once said that "he had found a man's sobriety to be in direct proportion to his cleanliness." Without admitting the universal accuracy of this opinion, there is no doubt that it contains within it the germs of a great truth. Drunkenness, that endless source of misery and crime, is not in itself so much a cause as an effect, the effect of the loss of that innate sense of self-respect which forms one of the great barriers between the man and the beast. "When we examine into the ultimate cause of a dangerous class," writes Canon Kingsley,[24] "into the one property common to all its members, whether thieves, beggars, profligates, or the merely pauperized--we find it to be this loss of self-respect. As long as that remains, poor souls may struggle on heroically, pure amid penury, filth, degradation unspeakable. But when self-respect is lost, they are lost with it. And whatever may be the fate of virtuous parents, children brought up in these dens of physical and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect. They sink, and they must sink, into a life on a level with the sights, sounds, aye, the very smells, which surround them."