Let the reader walk with us to a fashionable clothing establishment—a mart, we believe, as it is called. The building, as you approach it, seems a palace. It is redolent with polished mahogany and plate-glass and gilt. You pass it when the lamps are lit, and you think of the Arabian Nights. It is illuminated as if peace had just been proclaimed, or some great national desire had been realised. You enter with cash, and all is fair and smooth within. Whatever you want in the way of apparel is there, and at a price for which no honest tradesman can afford to sell it. Honest! asks the reader, is not the man honest? Does he steal the cloth? Certainly not. Does he not pay rent, and taxes, and wages? Most certainly he does. Do not his creditors all get twenty shillings in the pound? Most undoubtedly they do; the law protects them, and with them the man, willing or not, must keep himself right. So far as they are concerned, honesty is the best policy. How, then, does he make his profit? How is this monster establishment maintained? Out of what fund is it that its glitter and glare are paid for? We shall now see. Come down this stinking court. Go up those creaking stairs. Enter that miserable garret. Look at those men, who know nothing of labour but its curse, and of life but its misery. Mark the haggard faces already stamped with the impress of death. If you can bear the polluted atmosphere, you will hear from these men how they toil from early morning far into the night for two shillings a day; how for them the fine air and the golden sunshine, and the rest of the sabbath, exist not; and it is by them, by their sweat and blood and sinew, that the profit is made. And now go back and look into the gilded shop, and it will seem to you a Golgotha—a place of skulls. Is another illustration needed? Up in yon miserable chamber, without fire—without food—without furniture—almost without clothes, Martha Duke is stitching to earn the few pence by which she prolongs life, and its misery. Once, youth was hers, with its bright hopes and joys; but they are gone, and with an aching heart and pallid brow she plies her daily task. Is it wonderful that, wanting coals or something better than dry bread, the shirt or the waistcoat should be pawned? Is it not more wonderful that such bleak and hopeless poverty should be so honest as it is? And yet from such poor forlorn, forgotten women as these, proceed the profits which pay for dazzling window and gorgeous pile. Is it strange that the city missionaries for last year show an increase of fallen women in their districts of 1035?