Such are the conditions in America to-day; what they would be in the future, if present tendencies went on unchecked, the reader may learn by going to Europe, where industrial evolution has been slower in coming to a head, and where the people have been held down by religious superstition and military despotism. Let him take Mr. Richard Whiteing’s “No. 5 John Street”; or, if he has a particularly strong stomach, let him try Jack London’s “People of the Abyss,” or Charles Edward Russell’s terrifying story of the poverty of India, in his “Soldiers of the Common Good.” Here is a scene in a London park, selected, by way of example, from the first-named book: “We went up the narrow, gravelled walk. On the benches on either side was arrayed a mass of miserable and diseased humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of filth and rags, of all manner of loathsome skin-diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly nine months old, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with anyone looking after it. Next, half a dozen men sleeping bolt upright, and leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s arms, and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with his head in the lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep. ‘Those women there,’ said our guide, ‘will sell themselves for thru’pence or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread.’ He said it with a cheerful sneer.”