reach as diamonds.  The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried fish, bread and “strawberry flavour,” the coal bought by the “half-hundred,” the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the misery of sickness in a crowd—­all such things may be counted among the outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known them would call them trivial.  But by the unhappiness that springs from poverty I mean far worse than these.

The definition of happiness as “an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence, in a fully developed life” is ancient now, but I have never found a better.  From happiness so defined, poverty excludes our working-classes in the lump, almost without exception.  For them an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence is almost unknown, and a fully developed life impossible.  In both these respects their condition has probably become worse within the last century.  If there is a word of truth in what historians tell us, a working-man must certainly have had a better chance of exercising an energy of his soul before the development of factories and machinery.  What energy of the personal soul is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher of a thread in a machine?  How can a man or woman engaged in such labour for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life?  It seems likely that the old-fashioned workman who made things chiefly with his own hands and had some opportunity of personal interest in the work, stood a better chance of the happiness arising from an energy of the soul.  His life was also more fully developed by the variety and interest of his working material and surroundings.  This is the point to which our prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done.  For certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest possible happiness.

The second offspring of poverty in these working regions of our city is waste.  And I have called waste the twin brother of unhappiness because the two are very much alike.  By waste I do not here mean the death-rate of infants, though that stands at one in four.  No one, except an exploiter of labour, would desire a mere increase in the workpeople’s number without considering the quality of the increase.  But by waste I mean the multitudes of boys and girls who never get a chance of fulfilling their inborn capacities.  The country’s greatest shame and disaster arise from the custom which makes the line between the educated and the uneducated follow the line between the rich and the poor, almost without deviation.  That a nature capable of high development should be precluded by poverty from all development