“Overcrowding! Yes! You should have been stopping with me at Rookfort Castle the Christmas after young Lord Staunton had come of age! Two in each bedroom, I assure you, and they actually had the cheek to ask some of us to put up with the box-room at the top of the house, as every square foot of the place was occupied. Oh, yes, I know what trying to put too many eggs in one basket means! I went through it all on board the P. and O. _Arabia_, from Bombay. Six in a cabin; no room to dress, had to take it by turns; all the grub served in double relays; baths out of the question, unless a fellow sat up all night to grab one; and the promenade-deck like the enclosure at Ascot on Cup Day; which reminds me that I never was at any of the big races when the grand stand wasn’t crowded out. “Then, as to overcrowding in small houses, used I not to call upon poor Bristowe, my chum at Eton, who became a lawyer’s clerk at £300 a year, got married, had eleven children, and lives in a poky little house down Fulham way--only eight rooms--and I believe some of them sleep in the bathroom and the kitchen, and the slavey in the scullery!” Evidently the Hon. John did not know much about the social problem of overcrowding amongst the poor, and how it has arisen. “It is not good that man should be alone,” and ever since that divine maxim was enunciated, man has taken good care to act upon it, in more senses than one. His nature is gregarious, and as the world he was sent into ceased to give him its fruits spontaneously, he was obliged to take to a country life to obtain the means of existence by the sweat of his brow. He did not readily adapt himself to the new conditions, and, as the history of Babel shows, there was always a tendency to congregate, build great cities, and get as much agricultural work done as possible by slaves. Nowadays the dislike of solitude is more marked than ever. Who does not know of beautiful country vicarages whose inmates would give their souls to go and live in towns; of farms where wife and daughters pass their time in grumbling because it is so dull at the old house; of squatters far away in Gipp’s Land or Maneroo Plains, who, as soon as they make their pile, leave the roomy verandahed station, and, importuned by an impatient family, settle down at St. Kilda, Toorak, Darling Point, in Melbourne, or Sydney? Even peasants, country born and bred, seeking to “better themselves” in Canada, often cannot, or will not, bear the absence of such small excitement as falls to their lot in their native village. This is illustrated by a case known to myself, where a labouring lad, assisted out to the far West, and there obtaining good wages, and--what to him was luxury indeed--unlimited eggs to eat, threw up his situation and came back to his home in Kent and to his wretched wages, simply because, as he said, “It was too lonely in Manitoba; there was no amusement and no village inns.”