The evidence taken before the House of Lords Committee in 1882 was useful, but the facts were not up to date; members said things had changed since then, and the need for legislation had passed. It was necessary to bring information up to date, and that duty--albeit with some reluctance--Mr. Stead resolutely undertook. For four weeks, aided by two or three coadjutors of whose devotion and self-sacrifice, combined with a rare instinct for investigation and a singular personal fearlessness, he explored the London Inferno. "It has been a strange and unexampled experience," he wrote. "For a month I have oscillated between the noblest and meanest of mankind, the saviours and destroyers of their race. London beneath the gas glare of its innumerable lamps became, not like Paris in 1793--'a naphtha-lighted city of Dis'--but a resurrected and magnified City of the Plain, with the vices of Gomorrah, daring the vengeance of long-suffering Heaven. It seemed a strange inverted world, that in which I lived in those terrible weeks--the world of the streets and the brothel. It was the same, yet not the same, as the world of business and the world of politics. I heard much of the same people in the house of ill-fame as those of whom you hear in caucuses, in law courts, and on 'Change.' But all were judged by a different standard, and their relative importance was altogether changed. It was as if the position of our world had suddenly been altered, and you saw most of the planets and fixed stars in different combinations, so that at first it was difficult to recognise them. After a time the eye grows familiar with the foul and poisonous air, but at the best you wander in a Circe's isle, where the victims of the foul enchantress' wand meet you at every turn. But with a difference, for whereas the enchanted in olden times had the heads and the voices and the bristles of swine, while the heart of man was in them still, these have not put on in outward form the 'inglorious likeness of a beast,' but are in semblance as other men, while within there is only the heart of a beast--bestial, ferocious, and filthy beyond imagination of decent men. "For days and nights it is as if I had suffered the penalties inflicted upon the lost souls of the Moslem hell, for I seemed to have to drink of the purulent matter that flows from the bodies of the damned. But the sojourn in this hell has not been fruitless. The facts which I and my coadjutors have verified I now place on record at once as a revelation and a warning--a revelation of the system, and a warning to those who may be its victims. In the statement which follows I give no names and I omit addresses. My purpose was not to secure the punishment of criminals, but to lay bare the working of a great organisation of crime. But as a proof of good faith, I am prepared to substantiate the accuracy of every statement contained herein." . . . . . . . . . .