discomfort, dirt, squalor, and misery, a shambling, discouraged rabble of creatures that once were men and women. Those who have scrutinised the wreckage of humanity which collects in the so-called “able-bodied” workhouses, or can be seen drawn up on cold nights in ragged regiments on the Embankment waiting for the midnight dole of soup, will be more inclined to believe in the degradation than in the adventure. Yet the few persons who have gone forth without prejudice to know these despised and broken persons--tramps, criminals, prostitutes, unemployed, unemployable--who wander through the darkened ways of the City, have no such experience of universal collapse to record. Those who come as learners rather than teachers--with a sense of humour, of friendliness, an ultimate reverence for anything human, above all, with acceptance rather than with criticism--are perpetually astonished at the resistance which humanity is able to present to the most calamitous of outward circumstance. The revelation of the authentic witnesses--those in whom this queer universe has become articulate--is of a complete overturning of the accepted standards. In _Slavery_, Mr. Kennedy has traced the whole process of escape: from upbringing in a cellar dwelling at Manchester, through revolt against the tyranny of monotonous toil, to an enlisting in a kind of buccaneering expedition against all the world. It is the normal civilised universe seen (as it were) from the reverse side in which the grey has become blue and the blue grey. The inhabitants are at war upon the working world; using its charity and its clumsy legislation in order to suck from that world no small advantage. They have eluded, like the inheriting wealthy, the obligations of labour; like the inheriting wealthy they possess their own exacting moral codes, differing from the moral codes of working humanity, which supports them, if not with equanimity, at least with fortitude. Mr. W. H. Davies, in his _Autobiography of a Super-tramp_, offers a similar and more amazing life history. “I was born thirty-five years ago, in a public-house called the Church House, in the town of N----,” is the commencement of a story not altogether unworthy of Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_. Without his sincere, if somewhat intrusive, moral determinations, this voyager is also living amongst the aborigines on the desert island of this “floating, transitory world.” In the final chapter he sums up the philosophical advice which he would bequeath to similar sojourners. The most important dogma of it is “contained in the simple words: ‘Never live in a house next door to your landlord or landlady’; which,” he declares, “deserves to become a proverb.” “Many people might not consider this warning necessary,” he concludes, “but the hint may be useful to poor travellers like myself, who, sick of wandering, would settle down to the peace and quiet of after days.”