The simple thing always lacking in almost all working-class homes is the bath-room. I lay stress on this because I have experienced both the lack of a bath-room and the joy and convenience of one. Some rich people talk very glibly of the dirt and want of general cleanliness amongst the working class. Such people seem to forget that we all need space for cleanliness; that in tiny poky rooms, especially where there are children, it is quite impossible to preserve anything like healthy conditions. In many villages and in parts of some towns people are obliged to pump and carry every drop of water they use. I wonder how many rich women could endure living, for a single day, packed away in one room with two or three children. I wonder what many of them would do if they were obliged to live in the same room with a husband and children while giving birth to another child. There are multitudes of people existing under such conditions. I called the other day at a soldier’s home. It was one of those one-roomed places. A little child of four years of age, a man and his wife lived in it. Two days after I called another baby came. There was nowhere for the man to live except in this room, so the woman who nursed his wife just came in occasionally and went away again. To me the marvel is that people are able to breathe at all in such places. It was not dirty in the ordinary sense, but there was too much breathing in the one place, too much furniture, too much of everything, and as I sat there I felt I wanted to blow the windows out in order to let in more light and air. And now after a week or two of struggle the baby is dead. It has joined the great multitude of children murdered by bad social conditions. Poor mite, it is happier now. For it there is no care or poverty; but _we_ are all poorer, for it is one more of God’s good gifts to man slain and driven out because of man’s worship of Mammon, because of man’s inhumanity to man. There is no reason except selfishness and indifference why little ones like this should perish. Rents are so high and wages are so low that the workers cannot live in better places. The man I visited is invalided out of the Army, and just exists on the very mean and paltry allowance--just enough to starve on--granted him, partly by the National Insurance Commissioners, and partly by a grateful country which can no longer use him as part of its fighting machine. The man in his day has been a good worker, and would still work if his health were not wrecked by service in the Army. Even when working he would not have been able to secure much more than one extra room, and according to the standard of the district this would have been considered comparative comfort.