blaming their neighbours, blame themselves for the discomfort of their own position, and sometimes determine that their next birth shall be a happier one by making the very best they can of the disadvantages here. Then again, poverty there is really not as terrible as here; you read of a famine that sweeps away hundreds of thousands of the people, but is that really so very much more terrible than the continual condition of underfeeding in which our submerged classes live? The Registrar-General does not mark them down “Died of Starvation”—that would be shocking the public taste; but if you look into the matter you will see that when the starved sempstress going home carrying her work is struck by an east wind that whistles through her thin clothing and strikes on her underfed body, she is put down in the report as “Died of pneumonia, bronchitis, or consumption,” but in karma’s record she is marked down “Died of starvation,” for it is the perennial underfeeding that brings about the great mortality among the poor. I need only take a very few cases as examples in order to show you what this poverty means. I have taken them out of casual papers during the last week: from my own experience of the past I know them not to be exaggerated, but these particular cases happen to be going on just now. One of them is the case of the women who sew on cards the hooks and eyes which we buy very cheaply in the shops. Such a woman sews nearly 47,000 hooks and eyes for 1s. 2½d.—a thousand almost per farthing. Think what it means. Naturally she pulls in her children to help her; and so the children, who are obliged to go to school, for we have compulsory education, when they come back from learning their lessons have to sit down and set to work linking the hooks and the eyes together so as to save a little of the mother’s time, and the children, who ought to be playing and building up strong and healthy bodies, are kept there hour after hour preparing the hooks and eyes for which the mother is to receive the princely payment that I have mentioned. Take another case that everybody knows—shirt-making: 1s. a dozen for men’s shirts, and there is a fair amount of work in those; even that is not the lowest depth, for the woman who takes them out to make at 1s. per dozen lets them out again at 8d. per dozen to a woman more miserable than herself. And so the thing goes on, home after home, person after person. This and the preceding case I am taking from the last issue of _The Christian Commonwealth_. Another case is mentioned there of a woman who had been working along these lines; her particular work, I think, was 5d. per dozen for collars, and find your own thread. She was brought up as a typical case before the Royal Commission. We are always ready to appoint Royal Commissions, but not very much comes out of them after they have taken evidence. She was asked by a Member of Parliament: “How do you and your children live on what you get in this way?” “We don’t live,”