can hardly pay our shilling or eighteenpence a week here; and if we could, they wouldn't have families in one room in 'spectable streets." This illustrates the importance of the very desirable improvements in progress in London, which remove these wretched habitations, being accompanied by the erection of others more suitable for them. As these improvements may be said, in this sense, to be made at the expense of thousands of the industrious and honest very poor, who are compelled to live in company with abandoned characters, and to whom a central situation is very important on various accounts, does not justice require that such an arrangement should be made, to provide them with decent habitations?

The following extract from the first address of the Metropolitan Working Classes Association, will be read with painful interest, and exhibits in a striking light, how truly the lower orders of society, both temporally and spiritually, are "the flock of the slaughter." The statement is taken from Mr. Chadwick's Report to the Poor Law Commissioners, July, 1842. It refers to Bethnal Green :-" The average age at death of the gentlemen residents is 45 years, that of the working population only 16."

Dr. Southwood Smith has remarked upon the peculiar depression of spirits and emaciation, produced by inhaling the impure atmospheres of these close, filthy, and ill-ventilated neighbourhoods. This amiable and learned physician considers such depression to be one cause of the intemperance of the working classes—a statement with which I entirely coincide. A common expression is, "You feels low and dull like, and a drop of gin cheers yer."

It is admitted on all hands, that within the last six years, degraded as the district allotted to me was on my leaving it, yet considerable improvement had taken place from what it once was. If it was then a lowest depth of degradation :

The following is an extract from the preliminary observations to my first Annual Report to the City Mission, 1845:-"The Cow Cross district appears ever to have been regarded, as one of the very worst class of districts visited by the City Mission. Indeed, the state and character of the inhabitants on various portions of the district, almost baffles description. But the other

day a woman was heard, whilst washing her little child, teaching the child to utter abominable expressions, and threatening the infant with chastisement if it disobeyed. Such a circumstance is far from uncommon. Extreme ignorance and extreme drunkenness prevail on the district. Bred in vice and ignorance, as above fearfully described, the children hear oaths and execrations around them continually. They grow up hardened and vicious. Half-starved and halfnaked, the boys crowd in shoals, meditating plunder; and Mr. Serjeant Adams, at the Sessions House, abutting on the district, remarked lately on the vast numbers of juvenile delinquents brought from the vicinity. The shopkeepers complain loudly to your Missionary of the continued losses they sustain, by the abstraction of the goods from their shops. Fifty shops are open on the district for trade on the Sabbathday. Fights are very common on the district, amongst women as well as men. On one occasion

four women fought one, and, in

common phrase

ology, nearly beat her to death. She was represented as a mass of bruises from head to foot.

A mere child, named S―, residing in only eleven

years of age, is now in the House of

Correction. The charge was theft and threatening to stab the prosecutor.* The police are abused and defied by some of the inhabitants from their windows; and, on a recent occasion, whilst conveying a party to the Station-house, charged with committing a desperate assault on the superintendent of our Ragged School on the Sabbath, were stoned and pelted by the partizans of the delinquent in a most savage manner. One woman, the other day, kicked another violently in the bowels, only the day previous to her confinement.-But we must pause; suffice it to add, that speaking with the utmost caution, two out of three adults on the district appear to be drunkards, and it is well known how peculiarly mischievous this vice is, in extinguishing right feelings, and even natural affection, and lifting up in the soul the rampant influences of the flesh and the devil."

The dirtiness of the habits of the people in many instances is extremely repulsive; this arises partly from their extreme poverty, and partly from dissipation. On my first appointment to

* This youth has since become reformed, and is in India. An account of him will be found in a future chapter-Criminal Population.

the district, in 1845, I was called upon to encounter a severe trial. I was seized with violent itchings between the joints, accompanied with redness. I appeared to have caught the itch. Dr. West, one of the honorary physicians to the Mission, could not decide whether it was itch or not, nor could I decide positively, although I had studied for several years with a view to the medical profession. I was careful, however, to keep away from my friends in a room by myself, and after a few days the intolerable itching went off. A large amount of itch existed on the district, and it is possible I was labouring under an incipient stage of the complaint, which strict habits of cleanliness speedily checked. I was much discouraged, and shortly afterwards very nearly closed in with an offer, to take co-charge of an extensive missionary establishment in India. However, having but just commenced this arduous mission, I did not like to be baffled thus, and I prayed much, and saw afterwards the providence of God in my remaining. As will be seen, I was shortly afterwards made eminently useful in connection with the Ragged Schools upon my district, then only Sunday Schools, and I was further encouraged by some most striking cases of con

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