But they are lost souls every one of them. There is not one among the hundreds who crowd the notorious lodging-houses of this terrible guilt garden of the West who is still making an effort to earn an honest livelihood. Most of them are thieves when opportunity offers. They are not professional thieves, but many of them are in league with rascals of the worst type, loafers and hooligans, who are not ashamed to beat and maltreat women and force money from them. This district is a district of despair to the philanthropist, the social reformer, and the Christian worker. It has been called the Avenue of the West. It is a cesspool to which all that is worst in the squalid vice of the capital flows. And the pity of it is that the stream is constantly fed by tributaries from the cleaner, greener land beyond. It is here that hundreds of our rural immigrants drift in ignorance or in despair of London's vastness and inhospitality, and here they rapidly deteriorate, and become in time as evil as their environment. There is no mystery about the character of the people in these streets of shame. And yet the element of mystery greets you at every turn, whether you wander these byways of wickedness by day or by night. If you would explore the mysteries of the Avemus, it is not in the houses or the streets that you will see the veil lifted. But stand with me in this room in the school where the mentally and physically feeble offspring of degenerate parents are cared for and taught. Listen to the cry of a woman, who pours her heart out to the sympathetic teacher who has sent for her to give her advice about her little boy. "It's the place, miss," wails the woman. "It's ruin to us all to be in it. It's ruined his father--it's ruined me, and it's ruining the children. If I could only get out of it! But I can't--I never shall now." Ten years ago this woman and her husband came from the country to try their luck in London. The man failed to get work, fell in with evil companions, and they drifted to the Avemus. The husband is a loafer--the wife does a little work at a laundry when she can get it. They live in a vile street, where oaths and foul language and brutal deeds are all they hear and see. The house they live in is filled with bad characters. The eldest boy--he came a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked child from the country with his parents--is in prison; the girl, who was bom after they came to the Avemus, is in an idiot asylum; the boy at the school is developing criminal tendencies. The mother sees with despair the min of her family, but she is helpless to avert it. Her husband is a drunkard. She herself has fallen into the slough at last. Her case is typical of hundreds in the neighbourhood. So terrible is the effect of the environment on the children that day and night the Industrial School officers are searching for girls and boys, whose only hope of salvation is to be separated from their parents.