menace to society, have become rewoven into the social fabric. With all busy working for subsistence, none have leisure to cry out or to demonstrate in favour of change. Partly this is due to a real breakdown in the new party. Socialism has been largely abandoned. Shifted forward to the distant generations of the future, it has failed to provide stimulus for the active sacrifice of the present. The leaders who exhibited such brilliant promise have gone under or passed into obscurity. No one has arisen. of magnetic personality to unite the scattered and discouraged forces of progress and push forward towards the attainment of "the day of better things."

And the enthusiasm of the Upper and Middle Classes has ebbed with the failure of the dull and unimaginative population to respond to their earlier efforts. "People," a careful observer has told us, "have become tired of the poor." Results seem so inadequate; the material is so stubborn and unpliant; it seems better after all to let things drift and trust piously in a Divine Providence working all things for good. Age after age has passed, scheme after scheme has been tried, and in essence the problem remains as far from solution as ever. There was the Age of Socialism, when middle-class enthusiasts abandoned their comfortable surroundings to preach to the workers by rainy corner and in dismal meeting the gospel of the New Era. And the result was but scorn and dull indifference and rejection of a creed only promising benefit to generations still unborn. There was the Age of Slumming, when, stimulated by the cloying pathos of the popular novelist, the wealthy and good of the West descended, halo-crowned, into hovel and cellar, to demonstrate by songs and smiles and sympathy the affection of the rich for the poor. There was the Age of Settlements, when the Universities essayed their hands and founded citadels in the dark quarters of the great cities, attempting by the diffusion of diluted knowledge and culture to beautify the lives of the toilers. There was the Age of Philanthropy, falsely so called, when Mansion House Funds and similar charities rained golden showers on an imperturbable and dissatisfied populace; when General

Booth received a hundred thousand pounds to eliminate the submerged, and the benevolence of the wealthy, imparting of their superfluity, was hailed as the true solution of the social difficulty. All these have risen and flourished and passed away, and the problem still remains in all its sordid, unimaginable vastness as insoluble as ever. Still the poor perisheth and no man layeth it to heart; still drink and disease ravage the population of the poorer parts of our great cities; still classes tear themselves apart, and the immense dreary shelters of the manual labourers increase in magnitude and density.

wonder if, after the failure of all these sanguine schemes, those who introduced them turn away in disgust from a people so intractable, and refuse to disturb themselves longer with a problem apparently beyond human endeavour.

It would be futile to deny that great changes, and in many respects great improvements, have taken place in large areas since men first awakened in the mid-century to the vital importance of the "Condition of the People" problem. Those observers who have concentrated their attention on the evils noted by former critics may indeed be pardoned if they but note the continuous triumph of light over darkness; if they hold that the forces still working are certain in the long run to produce a final victory. Utter lack of sanitation, great districts neglected by public bodies and private charity, a population hidden behind the trodden ways of men growing up in undisturbed heathendom and bestiality: these appear no longer possible. Public bodies, the London County Council and similar authorities in the great provincial cities, have been pushing their activities into the dark places of the earth; slum areas are broken up, sanitary regulations enforced, the policeman and the inspector at every corner. A series of factory acts, building acts, public health acts, have continually assailed the worst of these evils; and although an amount remains to be done which may well tax the energies of philanthropist and statesmen for many years to come, yet we may agree that the forces of progress are against these older social diseases, which eventually

must disappear before the machinery which is brought against them.

But while men have slept other forces have arisen and changes taken place even as yet unappreciated by the majority of the people. Throughout the century the population of England has exhibited a continuous drift into the great cities; and now, at the opening of a new era, it is necessary to recognise that we are face to face with a phenomenon unique in the world's history. Turbu lent rioting over military successes, Hooliganism, and a certain temper of fickle excitability has revealed to observers during the past few months that a new race, hitherto unreckoned and of incalculable action, is entering the sphere of practical importance-the "City type" of the coming years; the "street-bred" people of the twentieth century; the "new generation knocking at our doors."

The England of the past has been an England of reserved, silent men, dispersed in small towns, villages, and country homes. The England of the future is an England packed tightly in such gigantic aggregations of population as the world has never before seen. The change has been largely concealed by the perpetual swarm of immigrants from the surrounding districts, which has permeated the whole of such a town as London with a healthy, energetic population reared amidst the fresh air and quieting influences of the life of the fields. But in the past twenty-five years a force has been operating in the raw material of which the city is composed. The texture itself has been transformed as by some subtle alchemy. The second generation of the immigrants has been reared in the courts and crowded ways of the great metropolis, with cramped physical accessories, hot, fretful life, and long hours of sedentary or unhealthy toil. The problem of the coming years is just the problem of this New Town type; upon their development and action depend the future progress of the Anglo-Saxon Race, and for the next half-century at least the policy of the British Empire in the world.

Remembering this, noting that a mandate from London may change the happiness and welfare of innumerable

multitudes to whom the very existence of London and of England is unknown, we may well consider this new type and its future possibilities worthy of serious study. Its development is too recent to enable its characteristics to be fully apprehended. Briefly, however, we may say that it is physically, mentally, and spiritually different from the type characteristic of Englishmen during the past two hundred years. The physical change is the result of the city up-bringing in twice-breathed air in the crowded quarters of the labouring classes. This as a substitute for the spacious places of the old, silent life of England; close to the ground, vibrating to the lengthy, unhurried processes of Nature. The result is the production of a characteristic physical type of town dweller stunted, narrow-chested, easily wearied; yet voluble, excitable, with little ballast, stamina, or endurance-seeking stimulus in drink, in betting, in any unaccustomed conflicts at home or abroad. Upon these city generations there has operated the now widely spread influence of thirty years of elementary school teaching. The result is a mental change; each individual has been endowed with the power of reading, and a certain dim and cloudy capacity for comprehending what he reads. Hence the vogue of the new sensational press, with its enormous circulation and baneful influence; the perpetual demand of the reader for fiercer excitement ("more chops, bloody ones, with gristle!") from his papers; and the strenuous competition of the papers, in their fight for his patronage, each to become the most clamorous, lurid, and dreadful.

A change more vital and more ominous for the future is widely attested by those familiar with this new City type: the almost universal decay, amongst these massed and unheeded populations, of any form of spiritual religion. Morally, indeed, they for the most part accept a standard which is the astonishment of their friends. Patience under misfortune, a persistent cheerfulness, family affection, and neighbourly helpfulness are widespread amongst them. But the spiritual world, whether in Nature, in Art, or in definite Religion, has vanished, and the curtain of the

horizon has descended round the material things and the pitiful duration of human life. In former time in England, for better or worse, the things of the earth were shot with spiritual significance; heaven and hell stretched out as permanent realities; the "kingdom of all the worlds" rose up as "the theatre of man's achievements" and "the measure of his destiny." To-day amongst the masses of our great towns God is faintly apprehended as an amiable but absentee ruler; heaven and hell are passing to the memories of a far-off childhood, the one ceasing to attract, the other to alarm. The full effect of this change has yet to be demonstrated; but certain results are already discernible. An increasing craving for material satisfaction before the night cometh which will close all, and a fiercer refusal to endure hardship and privation during the lean years, and a concentration on the purely earthly outlook of a commercial Imperialism, heedless of abstract spiritual ideas, will be some of the least results of this change in human character.

The statements thus dogmatically presented will prob ably require in the minds of most readers further demonstration of their truth; and it will be necessary to examine somewhat more carefully the condition of affairs in the lower quarters of our great cities. The problem, in effect the same in all these gigantic aggregations, has reached its fullest development in London; and we shall do well to concentrate our attention upon this enormous mass of population, where we shall be able to trace most clearly the lines of progress and the change from the old conditions to the new.

I. THE NEW PROBLEM.

Here, then, in London we shall find manifest both the diminishing virulence of the older social diseases and the steadily deepening gravity of the problem of the coming

race.

The evils upon which public interest was concentrated in the last period of public awakening are for the most