In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless.  They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded.  They have no home life.  In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent.  And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding.  When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined.

   “Dull despair and misery
   Lie about them from their birth;
   Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
   Are their earliest lullaby.”

A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room.  Their income does not increase with the years, though their family does, and the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job.  A baby comes, and then another.  This means that more room should be obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense and make it absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters.  More babies come.  There is not room in which to turn around.  The youngsters run the streets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comes to a head, and out they go on the streets for good.  The boy, if he be lucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any one of several ends.  But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this manner to leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a paltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end.  And the bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose body the police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street, Whitechapel.  Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure.  She was sixty-two years old and a match vendor.  She died as a wild animal dies.

Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End police court.  His head was barely visible above the railing.  He was being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he had spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for food.

“Why didn’t you ask the woman for food?” the magistrate demanded, in a hurt sort of tone.  “She would surely have given you something to eat.”

“If I ’ad arsked ’er, I’d got locked up for beggin’,” was the boy’s reply.

The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke.  Nobody knew the boy, nor his father or mother.  He was without beginning or antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the jungle of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the strong.