Hundreds of people who lived in this way had neighbours within a hundred yards of their front doors who never had enough to eat. Even such people as these had to pay preposterous rents for the privilege of huddling together in a single wretched room. But many of their wealthy neighbours spent hundreds, and even thousands of pounds a year over securing comfort and happiness for such domestic animals as horses, dogs, cats, and the like. Amiable, kindly gentlefolk they were, with tender hearts and ready sympathies. Most of them were interested in some form of charity. Many of them specialized, and these would devote much energy to opposing the work of other charitable specialists. Lady So-and-so, who advocated this panacea, found herself bitterly opposed by Sir So-and-so, who wanted all sufferers to be made to take his nostrum in his special way. Then sometimes poor Lady So-and-so would throw up her panacea in a huff, and concentrate her energies upon the work of some society for converting Jews, who did not want to be converted, or for supplying red flannel petticoats for South Sea Island girls, who infinitely preferred cotton shifts and floral wreaths. Even these futile charities were permitted to overlap one another to a bewilderingly wasteful extent. But the two saddest aspects of the whole gigantic muddle so far as charitable work went, were undoubtedly these: The fact that much of it went to produce a class of men and women who would not do any kind of work because they found that by judicious sponging they could live and obtain alcohol and tobacco in idleness; and the fact that where charitable endeavour infringed upon vested interests, licit or illicit, it was savagely opposed by the persons interested. The discipline of the national schools was slack, intermittent, and of short reach. There was positively no duty to the State which a youth was bound to observe. Broadly, it might be said that at that time discipline simply did not enter at all into the life of the poor of the towns, and charity of every conceivable and inconceivable kind did enter into it at every turn. The police service was excellent and crime exceedingly difficult of accomplishment. The inevitable result was the evolution in the towns of a class of men and women, but more especially of men, who, though compact of criminal instincts of every kind, yet committed no offence against criminal law. They committed nothing. They simply lived, drinking to excess when possible, determined upon one point only: that they never would do anything which could possibly be called work. It is obvious that among such people the sense of duty either to themselves, to each other, or to the State, was merely non-existent.