350 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. 



destitution; and to have abolished actual death from 

 starvation in the richest and most charitable city in the 

 world. But the facts are exactly the opposite of all 

 this; and I submit that there is no rational explanation of 

 them other than a continuous increase of the extremest 

 forms of misery and want. 



Illustrations of the Poverty of To-day. 



But these figures, proving the unequal distribution of 

 wealth and the widespread destitution in our midst, how- 

 ever important and expressive to the thinker and the 

 student, do not enable the general reader to realize their 

 full meaning without a few concrete examples of what 

 the poverty of to-day actually is. A few illustrative 

 cases will therefore be given as typical of thousands and 

 hundreds of thousands in every part of our country. 



And first, let us hear what the author of the " Bitter 

 Cry of Outcast London " had to say in 1883, the state- 

 ments in which work, though at first denied or declared 

 to be exaggerated, were proved to be exact by the Com- 

 mission of Enquiry which followed shortly after. And 

 first as to the places in which the very poor live. 



" Few who will read these pages have any conception 

 of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where 

 tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors 

 which call to mind what we have heard of the middle 

 passage of the slaveship. To get into them you have 

 to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous gases arising 

 frdm accumulations of sewage and refuse scattered in all 

 directions and often flowing beneath your feet; courts, 

 many of them which the sun never penetrates, which are 

 never visited by a breath of fresh air, and which rarely 



