THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 233 



conditions of the people, with much apparent anomaly 

 in the general arrangement at particular points ; nay, 

 there cannot fail to be a constant drip drip of human 

 failure from every part of the social edifice, forming in 

 places pools of foul sedimentary deposit, even while 

 the labour market is capable of giving employment to 

 every man willing to be employed. The wretched 

 victims of intemperance and of vicious propensions, 

 fallen in many cases from bright hopes and promising 

 opportunities, have a tendency to herd together and 

 form nurseries of vice and crime, as we see in the 

 slums and rookeries of our great towns. The 

 children that are born and reared in the moral 

 miasma of these foul resorts are not born in the 

 labour market, nor fitted for entering it. 



Let no man labour under the delusion that the vice 

 and misery that abound in London's saddest places are 

 attributable either to a deficient labour market or to 

 the inhuman arrangements of a corrupt civilisation, as 

 Socialistic writers would fain persuade us is the case. 

 They are for the most part the effect of the unwhole- 

 some aggregation of vicious individuals, the accumula- 

 tions of the continuous deposition of human sediment 

 that is ever falling out of respectable society, a 

 decidence that no known or conceivable organisation 

 of benevolent agencies can suffice to prevent or, in 

 any great degree, to mitigate. 



But the misery and destitution of great towns 

 is not confined to the creatures who dwell in slums 

 and rookeries. In the crowded streets of London 



