As Mr. Rider Haggard has remarked, “Some parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the veldt of Africa.” Therefore there is the danger ahead that Goldsmith’s foreboding may be realised:-- “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay. Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade, A breath can make them as a breath has made, But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When once destroyed can never be supplied.” Hodge, as a class, cannot emigrate. He has muscle, he has a wife and usually several children, but he has no capital, and the colonies, with the exception of Canada, do not encourage him or want him without. His advent also means a disturbance in the labour market and lowers the wage rate. So millions of acres of fertile land in our dependencies where there is room, and more than room, for all, remain untilled, dependencies created by British capital, defended from invasion by British fleets, helped by British taxpayers, but allowed by a succession of Governments, with the precedent of the American colonies in their minds, to surround themselves with _chevaux-de-frise_ of exclusiveness. No longer do great clipper ships leave these shores crowded with hopeful emigrants, the refrain of “Cheer, boys, cheer,” on their lips, and speed across wide oceans to the Antipodes. A new order of things prevails. Workmen’s wages in Australasia must be maintained at a fixed standard, come what may. Heavy duties must be levied to effect this, and everything must be “protected,” except the interests of Great Britain. But Hodge wants to move somewhere and earn more money, so he and his belongings migrate to London, side by side with other kinds of impoverished labourers; but, alas! for them, side by side also with the poor alien, who is unquestionably one great cause of the congestion in certain districts. Russians, Poles, and Germans swarm into the world’s metropolis, whose streets, they have been told, are paved with gold that only requires picking up! They are willing to pay almost any price for wretched accommodation near their work, where they herd together under conditions as low as they can well be. The following illustrates this. At the London Hospital in December of last year Mr. Wynne E. Baxter held an inquest on the body of Mary Moretsky Libermann, aged nine, who was accidentally burnt to death. The coroner said the only articles in the room where the fatality took place were a small bed and a broken chair, and that the mother and two children slept in the bed, and four other children on the floor. The woman, it appeared, came from Russia, and had only been in England seven weeks. For the small room she paid 3_s._ 6_d._ a week. A juryman urged that there ought to be some sort of supervision over the kind of house in which this woman and her family existed. [Illustration: FIG. 36. WHERE THE POOR LIVE Original drawing by Hanslip Fletcher