a yearly tribute of 2,000 pounds, and the 5,336 families above mentioned
in Westminster, a yearly rent of 40,000 pounds.

The most extensive working-people's district lies east of the Tower in
Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, where the greatest masses of London
working-people live. Let us hear Mr. G. Alston, preacher of St.
Philip's, Bethnal Green, on the condition of his parish. He says:

"It contains 1,400 houses, inhabited by 2,795 families, or about
12,000 persons. The space upon which this large population dwells, is
less than 400 yards (1,200 feet) square, and in this overcrowding it
is nothing unusual to find a man, his wife, four or five children,
and, sometimes, both grandparents, all in one single room, where they
eat, sleep, and work. I believe that before the Bishop of London
called attention to this most poverty-stricken parish, people at the
West End knew as little of it as of the savages of Australia or the
South Sea Isles. And if we make ourselves acquainted with these
unfortunates, through personal observation, if we watch them at their
scanty meal and see them bowed by illness and want of work, we shall
find such a mass of helplessness and misery, that a nation like ours
must blush that these things can be possible. I was rector near
Huddersfield during the three years in which the mills were at their
worst, but I have never seen such complete helplessness of the poor as
since then in Bethnal Green. Not one father of a family in ten in the
whole neighbourhood has other clothing than his working suit, and that
is as bad and tattered as possible; many, indeed, have no other
covering for the night than these rags, and no bed, save a sack of
straw and shavings."

The foregoing description furnishes an idea of the aspect of the interior