problem which clamours most pressingly for a solution. Only one thing
I may say in passing. Then is nothing in my scheme which will bring it
into collision either with Socialists of the State, or Socialists of
the Municipality, with Individualists or Nationalists, or any of the
various schools of though in the great field of social economics--
excepting only those anti-christian economists who hold that it is an
offence against the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to try to
save the weakest from going to the wall, and who believe that when once
a man is down the supreme duty of a self-regarding Society is to jump
upon him. Such economists will naturally be disappointed with this
book I venture to believe that all others will find nothing in it to
offend their favourite theories, but perhaps something of helpful
suggestion which they may utilise hereafter. What, then, is Darkest
England? For whom do we claim that "urgency" which gives their case
priority over that of all other sections of their countrymen and
countrywomen?

I claim it for the Lost, for the Outcast, for the Disinherited of the
World.

These, it may be said, are but phrases. Who are the Lost? reply, not
in a religious, but in a social sense, the lost are those who have gone
under, who have lost their foothold in Society, those to whom the
prayer to our Heavenly Father, "Give us day by day our daily bread,"
is either unfulfilled, or only fulfilled by the Devil's agency: by the
earnings of vice, the proceeds of crime, or the contribution enforced
by the threat of the law.

But I will be more precise. The denizens in Darkest England; for whom
I appeal, are (1) those who, having no capital or income of their own,