at a cost of #40,000,000, and has never ceased boasting about it since.
But at our own doors, from "Plymouth to Peterhead," stretches this
waste Continent of humanity--three million human beings who are
enslaved--some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian
overseer, all of them to destitution and despair?

Is anything to be done with them? Can anything be done for them?
Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as
insoluble as that of the London sewage, which, feculent and festering,
swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and
flow of the tide?

This Submerged Tenth--is it, then, beyond the reach of the
nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they
rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will
be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing
can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom
he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an
asylum or a gaol.

But is not one in ten a proportion scandalously high?
The Israelites of old set apart one tribe in twelve to minister to
the Lord in the service of the Temple; but must we doom one in ten of
"God's Englishmen" to the service of the great Twin Devils--
Destitution and Despair?


CHAPTER 3. THE HOMELESS

Darkest England may be described as consisting broadly of three