352 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. CHAP. xx. 



ing match boxes at 2 \d. a gross, and has to pay a girl IcL 

 a gross to help her. Here is a mother who has pawned 

 her four children's clothes, not for drink, but for coals 

 and food. She obtained only a shilling, and bought 

 seven pounds of coals and a loaf of bread! Think of 

 the agony of distress a mother must have endured before 

 she could do this! And the fifteen years that have 

 passed, notwithstanding the " Royal Commission," 

 leaves it all just as bad as before. This is what Mr. 

 Arthur Sherwell says, in his recently published " Life 

 in West London/' as to the district north of Soho, where 

 there are more than 100,000 persons living below " the 

 margin of poverty " : 



" Even under normal conditions the pressure of pov- 

 erty represented by these figures is extreme; but when, 

 as in 1895, the winter is of exceptional severity, the 

 pressure becomes intolerable. Many of the families 

 lived for weeks on soup and bread from the various 

 charitable soup-kitchens in the neighborhood. Every 

 available article of furniture or clothing was sold or 

 pawned; in some cases the boots were taken off the chil- 

 dren's feet and pawned for bread or fuel. A number 

 of families, even in the bitterest times of the long frost, 

 lived for days without fire or light, and often with no 

 food but a chance morsel of bread or tea. One family 

 had lived for weeks on bread and tea and dripping. In 

 another room a family was found consisting of the 

 mother and six children (the father had been in the in- 

 firmary for seven weeks), who had lived on a penny- 

 worth of bread, a pennyworth of tea, a halfpennyworth 

 of sugar, and a halfpennyworth of milk every other 

 day, and this was got on credit. . . In a filthy room in 



