The Rev. S. A. Barnett, of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, who knows the East End of London so thoroughly, does not find the origin of poverty in the vices of the poor. Terrible as are the results of drunkenness, unthrift, and self-indulgence, it is not possible, if we view the facts dispassionately, to regard these as the main sources of poverty. We shall rather look upon these evils as the natural outcome of the fierce struggle for existence, which is carried on under our present industrial conditions. Morality is admittedly the truest and most real end of man, and therefore on a superficial aspect it is natural to represent the miseries of the very poor to be chiefly occasioned by their own faults. It is a comfortable view to take, for it at once lightens the responsibility of the rich man, and it salves his conscience by the specious plea that after all the poor and the wretched have brought half their troubles upon themselves; and as they have made their beds, so must they lie. But this is rather the attitude of the Pharisee than of the philanthropist, and the moral and social problems of our age and country will never be solved if approached in such a spirit. It is a cruel and unholy thing thus to intensify the struggle for existence among our own people by the ceaseless immigration of those, who, to quote the words of the Bishop of Bedford, "are at once demoralized and demoralizing."[26] Few have had more practical experience of the crowded East End of London than Dr. Billing, and he has given eloquent testimony to the injury worked upon our own people there by this wholesale invasion. In this fierce battle for life, of what use is it to utter trite platitudes about the "survival of the fittest," since, as another great authority, Lord Dunraven, has pointed out, "the fittest in this instance are those who are able to exist upon the lowest possible diet, in the greatest possible filth, and subject to the greatest amount of hardships and misery"?[27] Englishmen and Englishwomen were not formed thus to live, and thus to toil. They cannot do so without contracting diseased habits of body and mind--without becoming brutalized, in fact. They lose their self-respect, and go to swell that degraded class into which the _weaker_ as well as the _worst_ members of society show a perpetual tendency to sink--a class which not respecting itself does not respect others, which has nothing to lose and all to gain, and in which the lowest passions are ever ready to burst out and avenge themselves by frightful methods. That is why it is, at the present hour, in the crowded courts and teeming alleys of East London, there exist all the elements of something even more terrible in its way than the misery which brought about the French Revolution.