If you were to spend one night in the Avemus your face would be crimson with righteous indignation that little children should live open-eared and open-eyed in constant contact with such horrors. Do you see a broad-shouldered, burly, kindly-looking man walking quietly along the street? As he comes into sight a group of lads and lasses disperse as if by magic. There is a sudden bolt up a narrow passage that through a back street leads into the open thoroughfare. The big man smiles good-humouredly. He has seen the group, and the girl he wants was in it. He will find her before the night is over, because he will enter every house she is likely to have taken refuge in. He is the Industrial School's officer. Three years ago he rescued a girl from evil surroundings and she was sent to Canada. She has managed in some mysterious way to get back again across the sea, and has headed straight for the Avemus, where she has a bad mother, and a father who is worse. There is nothing brings the shame and degradation of one phase of London life so acutely home to you as a day and a night with the officers whose duty it is to remove the young from the homes and haunts of vice. In one street in the Avemus there are two hundred children growing up. There is not one house in the whole of that street that does not harbour women of the most degraded type. Many of these children are already busy as money-makers. Some of them are sent out into the streets to beg; to play their carefully planned tricks and dodges on the humanity of the passers-by. There are women who wash their faces, smooth their hair, and dress in seedy black as widows, and take little children out with them to beg. These "poor widows" starve the children and spend the money in drink. Sometimes they don't take their own children; they hire a deformed child or a cripple of a mother who is willing to let it out. There are hundreds of little children now in industrial homes who were forced into the streets to ply the trade of mendicity and mendacity, and who were treated with the most brutal violence by their parents if they came home empty-handed. Many a child, failing to get money by begging, would steal rather than go home to be received with foul words and brutal blows.