there glowed the fire and fervour of the prophet; and when a voice which, like Mr. Besant’s, had the ear of a hundred millions of English-speaking people, preached in the most fascinating of parables the doctrine that Wealth owes, and ever will owe, an undischarged duty to Poverty--a mighty impetus was given to the cause of social reform. Hands swift to do good were stretched forth from the West End to the East End, and a movement destined to realise, in the Jubilee Year of the Victorian era, some of Mr. Besant’s ideals in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” was now initiated. Unfortunately it was vulgarised by much imposture at the outset. The pace of three London seasons had been unusually rapid, and Society at this juncture had exhausted its resources of amusement and its capacities for pleasure. The town was fuller than usual, for Cabinet Councils had been unwontedly early; and the great families who flock to London when they get the first hint that the autumnal period of political intrigue has set in, had abandoned their country houses sooner in the year than was customary. The theatres were unattractive. The Fisheries Exhibition had closed; and the world of fashion was hungry for some fresh object of interest. Like Matthew Arnold’s patrician, though Society made its feast and crowned its brows with roses in the winter of 1883-4, it was still left lamenting that “No easier and no quicker passed The impracticable hours.” The movement in philanthropy which Mr. Besant’s writings originated, and which Lord Salisbury’s essay on the Housing of the Poor stamped with the imprimatur of British respectability, was just what was needed to supply a stimulus to which the blunted nerves of the idlest pleasure-seeker would respond. In the days of Lord Tom Noddy and Sir Carnaby Jenks persons of quality in similar circumstances would have gone to see a man hanged. Some years later, as M. Henri Taine notes, they would have applied for an escort of police and inspected the thieves’ kitchens and other hideous lairs of crime. Now, under escorts of enchanted philanthropists, lay and clerical, male and female, curious parties were organised in the West End to visit the slums, just as they were arranged to visit the opera. These amateur explorers were, indeed, dubbed “slummers” by cynical writers in the Press; and the verb to “slum” almost made good its footing in the English vocabulary. Few of these strange visitors remained behind in the East End to help in the work of charity whose objects excited their morbid curiosity. It was also an untoward coincidence that of these few some of the most fussy and bustling subsequently figured conspicuously in the Divorce Court.