So is being heaped up the wealth of the world. Under darkened skies, and in an existence starved of beauty, these communities of men and women and children continue their unchanging toil. Is the price being paid too great for the result attained? The cities have sucked in the healthy, stored-up energies of rural England; with an overwhelming percentage to-day of country upbringing. Must they ever thus be parasitic on another life outside, and this nation divide into breeding-grounds for the creation of human energies and consuming centres where these energies are destroyed? The standard of longevity has pitifully fallen in such places from that prevalent amongst the agricultural labourers. Workers formerly too old at sixty are now too old ten years earlier. The men are scourged by specific diseases; the mortality of the children is appalling. One is apt to be surprised, says Lady Bell, of the iron workers of Middlesborough, to find how many of the workmen are more or less ailing in different ways. “But we cease to be surprised when we realise how apt the conditions are to tell upon the health even of the strongest, and how many of the men engaged in it are spent by the time they are fifty. To say that this happens to half of them is probably a favourable estimate.” Of the women, Lady Bell brushes aside with a welcome contempt that newspaper and drawing-room cant which explains that a beneficent Providence has made the working classes insensible to pains and conditions which other classes would find intolerable. “It is not only bringing children into the world that affects the health of the working women. It is an entire delusion to believe that they are, as a rule, stronger, hardier, healthier, than the well-to-do. Their life is a continuous toil. They rarely go outside the doors of their houses, except for Saturday marketing and Sunday-evening exercise. Recreation, the stimulus of changed garments, rest during the day, or the other minor comforts which other classes find so necessary, are not for them. They are mostly convinced that it is wrong to sit down and read a book at any hour of the day. Their interests, not unnaturally, turn towards the stimulus of drinking, and of betting and gambling--two elements which at least can give colour in a life set in grey.”[3]