In one alley in Spitalfields there were last year ten houses in whose fifty-one rooms (none of them more than 8 ft. by 9 ft.--about the size of a biggish bathroom) no fewer than 254 human beings were distributed; from two to nine in each apartment, but nine in the room was not the maximum. There is an old story to the effect that a district visitor, sympathising with an occupant of some such lodging as the above in St. Giles’-in-the-Fields, where four families respectively _tenanted_ the four corners, was met with the philosophic reply, “Oh, yes, we should have been comfortable enough if the landlord hadn’t gone and let the middle of the room to a fifth family.” Think of all this, fathers and mothers, who jealously guard your children from every possible source of moral contamination, whose daughters’ modesty would be startled if accidentally a bedroom window momentarily revealed their toilettes, whose children at boarding-schools feel sensitive about dressing and undressing before others. Yet this is nothing! A well-known rector in the East End says: “From one of my parochial buildings I have seen through the thinly-veiled windows of a house, four men and six women retiring for the night in one room, all of them respectable, hard-working people, and the majority of them sleeping in beds on the floor,” the rent per week being eight shillings. As to the alleged dislike of the very poor to the use of soap and water, it is chiefly because the privacy essential for tubbing is simply non-existent. Probably the lowest depth is attained, as I have said, in the common lodging-house, where all kinds of characters assemble under conditions which make innocence and decency impossible, children looking without any emotion upon sights they ought never to see, and listening to language they ought never to hear. The victims of this result of overcrowding are human beings like ourselves, “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.” It is not from choice that men, women, and children are thus herded worse than cattle. Necessity compels them to dwell within a certain area, especially the “docker,” who cannot afford to take a journey in search of work, while the smallness and uncertainty of their earnings, together with the high rent they pay, deprive them of the power to exist otherwise.