I have quoted these figures to show the contrast between conditions in a large city and a comparatively rural community. But Alabama contains three cities of considerable size, which may account for a fairly large number of its paupers, so that I suspect that if the comparison were strictly carried out it would be found that pauperism is a good deal more of a city disease than it seems. The institutions in London to which I have referred, whether managed by private philanthropy or by the public, are mainly maintained for the sake of those who have already fallen in the struggle for existence. They are for the sick and wounded, so to speak. In recent years a movement has been steadily gaining ground which seeks to get at the source of this city disease, and by improving the conditions of city life do away to some extent with the causes of it. The work of reorganizing the life of the poorer classes in London seems to have made a beginning some fifty or sixty years ago. The condition of the working population at that time has been described in the following words by Mr. Sidney Webb, who has made a profound study of the condition of the labouring classes in London: Two thirds of the whole child population was growing up not only practically without schooling or religious influences of any kind, but also indescribably brutal and immoral; living amid the filth of vilely overcrowded courts, unprovided with water supply or sanitary conveniences, existing always at the lowest level of physical health, and constantly decimated by disease; incessantly under temptation by the flaring gin palaces which alone relieve the monotony of the mean streets to which they were doomed; graduating almost inevitably into vice and crime amid the now incredible street life of an unpoliced metropolis.[7] The first thing attempted was to provide public education for those who were not able to attend private schools, and, as one writer says, "rescue the children of the abyss." It was in this rescue work that England's public schools had their origin. These schools, begun in this way, steadily gained and broadened until now London has an elaborate system of continuation, trade and technical schools, culminating in the reorganized University of London. This system is by no means perfected; it still is in process, but it gives the outlines of a broad and generous educational plan, equal in conception and organization at least to the needs of the largest city in the world. London already has, for example, 327 night schools, with 127,130 pupils, in which young men and women who have left the day schools may continue their studies at night or perfect themselves in some branch of their trade.