which the single family is embedded in a cliff of bricks and mortar, is more and more coming to be the staple dwelling of the working classes. Broad, tree-planted avenues, with fast electric locomotion, cut through carefully planned cities of storey piled on storey. The whole effect is grandiose and spacious, if it lacks the picturesqueness of that enormous acreage of chimney-pots and tiny tumbled cottages which is revealed in a kind of smoky grandeur from the railway embankments of South and East London--the desperate efforts made by a race reared in village communities to maintain in the urban aggregation some semblance of a home. Such is the shelter; what of the food? The price of bread varies. Family budgets of the weekly incomes are extraordinarily suggestive of the struggle which takes place in the industrial areas of the city. Classified according to amount of net receipts, they reveal an ever-growing proportion devoted to the essentials of bodily nutriment; until, at the bottom, where the income appears permanently below the “living wage,” there is practically no margin left when the food demand is satisfied. “For the incomes below thirty shillings, two-thirds of the total income is spent on food, ‘declares a Board of Trade investigator,’ while in the case of the incomes of forty shillings and above, about fifty-seven per cent. is spent on food.” Amongst the poorest, actually one-fifth of the total food expenditure is spent on bread and flour: a conclusive statistic condemning those who lightly justify a tax on imported corn on the ground that so much stale bread is committed to the pigsty. Tea, in these lowest incomes, demands ninepence farthing a week, and sugar eightpence. It is expenditure on the margin, counted in farthings, a life exceedingly difficult to realise amongst those to whom a few coppers more or less means no appreciable difference.