Again, he told me that it has become the custom in large businesses of
which the dividends are falling, to put in a man called an
'Organizer,' who is often an American.

This Organizer goes through the whole staff and mercilessly dismisses
the elderly or the least efficient, dividing up their work among those
who remain. So these discarded men fall to rise no more and drift to
the poorhouse or the Shelters or the jails, and finally into the river
or a pauper's grave. First, however, many spend what may be called a
period of probation on the streets, where they sleep at night under
arches or on stairways, or on the inhospitable flagstones and benches
of the Embankment, even in winter.

The Staff-Captain informed me that on one night during the previous
November he counted no less than 120 men, women, and children sleeping
in the wet on or in the neighbourhood of the Embankment. Think of
it--in this one place! Think of it, you whose women and children, to
say nothing of yourselves, do not sleep on the Embankment in the wet
in November. It may be answered that they might have gone to the
casual ward, where there are generally vacancies. I suppose that they
might, but so perverse are many of them that they do not. Indeed,
often they declare bluntly that they would rather go to prison than to
the casual ward, as in prison they are more kindly treated.

The reader may have noted as he drove along the Embankment or other
London thoroughfares at night in winter, long queues of people waiting
their turn to get something. What they are waiting for is a cup of
soup and, perhaps, an opportunity of sheltering till the dawn, which
soup and shelter are supplied by the Salvation Army, and sometimes by