circles, one within the other. The outer and widest circle is
inhabited by the starving and the homeless, but honest, Poor.
The second by those who live by Vice; and the third and innermost
region at the centre is peopled by those who exist by Crime. The whole
of the three circles is sodden with Drink. Darkest England has many
more public-houses than the Forest of the Aruwimi has rivers, of which
Mr. Stanley sometimes had to cross three in half-an-hour.

The borders of this great lost land are not sharply defined. They are
continually expanding or contracting. Whenever there is a period of
depression in trade, they stretch; when prosperity returns, they
contract. So far as individuals are concerned, there are none among
the hundreds of thousands who live upon the outskirts of the dark
forest who can truly say that they or their children are secure from
being hopelessly entangled in its labyrinth. The death of the
bread-winner, a long illness, a failure in the City, or any one of a
thousand other causes which might be named, will bring within the first
circle those who at present imagine themselves free from all danger of
actual want. The death-rate in Darkest England is high. Death is the
great gaol-deliverer of the captives. But the dead are hardly in the
grave before their places are taken by others. Some escape, but the
majority, their health sapped by their surroundings, become weaker and
weaker, until at last they fall by the way, perishing without hope at
the very doors of the palatial mansions which, maybe, some of them
helped to build.

Some seven years ago a great outcry was made concerning the Housing of
the Poor. Much was said, and rightly said--it could not be said too
strongly--concerning the disease-breeding, manhood-destroying
character of many of the tenements in which the poor herd in our large