Let us pass to the next higher circle of the modern Inferno--the category of casual or very badly paid labour and chronic poverty, the makers of your cheap furniture and clothes and brushes, your match-boxes and chocolate-boxes, the hawkers and costers and regular porters and dockers. Now there are generally two rooms to each family, but the vermin still thrive in more than half of them, and the rooms are filthy, and the children breathe an air that is foul with drink and cursing and the most open and gross sexuality: not now in fifteen cases out of twenty, it is true, but in ten cases out of twenty. Food is habitually insufficient, for labour is uncertain, and profit is infinitesimal; and, as a man _must_ drink, there are constant disturbances to break the monotony and help one to forget the customary hunger. You may have at times noticed the dejected hawker returning, on a wet summer's day, with his tomatoes unsold: or the children eager to collect fragments of the lids of orange-boxes in the winter. Countess Russell told me that she once visited, unexpectedly, a group of homes of this class, within a few minutes' walk of Gordon Square, in the depth of winter. Hardly any had the material for a fire, and few had food in the house. So they live, year in, year out; and all that we propose to do is to give them five shillings a week each if they will sustain the burden honestly for six decades, or house and feed them in jail if they do not succeed in curbing their criminal impulses. Once, in the Westminster Court, I saw a young and humane judge hand certain tickets to the jury, when they had established the guilt of two petty criminals of this class. "These, gentlemen," he said, "are permits to inspect the jail; go some day and see the place to which you send criminals." A very wise and benevolent innovation, but we still await the judge who will send the jury to inspect the homes in which these men conceive crime. About 400,000 citizens of the greatest city in the world belong to this class. If 400,000 do not constitute a sufficiently important problem, let us see the homes of the next category. These are the irregularly employed and badly paid, though not the worst paid, workers: costers, labourers, dockers, etc. There are about a million of them in London alone. They know quite well what hunger is: for weeks together, sometimes, the wage does not suffice to buy that minimum quantity of nitrogen and carbon which men of science have declared to be necessary, and the money is ill expended. They know what cold is, for many a hard spell of winter finds them in want. They have two or three rooms to each family, but, as a rule, not much of that "Christian reticence" on which our clergy congratulate us.