too selfish, to spare it a thought. Only now and then, on rare
occasions, when some clear voice is heard giving more articulate
utterance to the miseries of the miserable men, do we pause in the
regular routine of our daily duties, and shudder as we realise for one
brief moment what life means to the inmates of the Slums. But one of
the grimmest social problems of our time should be sternly faced, not
with a view to the generation of profitless emotion, but with a view to
its solution.

Is it not time? There is, it is true, an audacity in the mere
suggestion that the problem is not insoluble that is enough to take
away the breath. But can nothing be done? If, after full and
exhaustive consideration, we come to the deliberate conclusion that
nothing can be done, and that it is the inevitable and inexorable
destiny of thousands of Englishmen to be brutalised into worse than
beasts by the condition of their environment, so be it. But if, on the
contrary, we are unable to believe that this "awful slough," which
engulfs the manhood and womanhood of generation after generation is
incapable of removal; and if the heart and intellect of mankind alike
revolt against the fatalism of despair, then, indeed, it is time, and
high time, that the question were faced in no mere dilettante spirit,
but with a resolute determination to make an end of the crying scandal
of our age.

What a satire it is upon our Christianity and our civilisation that the
existence of these colonies of heathens and savages in the heart of our
capital should attract so little attention! It is no better than a
ghastly mockery--theologians might use a stronger word--to call by
the name of One who came to seek and to save that which was lost those
Churches which in the midst of lost multitudes either sleep in apathy