now nothing like what they were then. Nobody would have found robbing me
a profitable employment in those days, and I used to walk through these
wretched dens without let or hindrance. Alleys nine or ten feet wide, I
suppose, with tall houses full of squalid drunken men and women, and the
pavement strewed with still more squalid children. The place of air was
taken by a steam of filthy exhalations; and the only relief to the
general dull apathy was a roar of words--filthy and brutal beyond
imagination--between the closed-packed neighbours, occasionally ending
in a general row. All this almost within hearing of the traffic of the
Strand, within easy reach of the wealth and plenty of the city.

I used to wonder sometimes why these people did not sally forth in mass
and get a few hours' eating and drinking and plunder to their hearts'
content, before the police could stop and hang a few of them. But the
poor wretches had not the heart even for that. As a slight, wiry
Liverpool detective once said to me when I asked him how it was he
managed to deal with such hulking ruffians as we were among, "Lord bless
you, sir, drink and disease leave nothing in them."

[This early contact with the sternest facts of the social problem
impressed him profoundly. And though not actively employed in what is
generally called "philanthropy," still he did his part, hopefully but
soberly, not only to throw light on the true issues and to strip away
make-believe from them, but also to bring knowledge to the working
classes, and to institute machinery by which capacity should be caught
and led to a position where it might be useful instead of dangerous to
social order.

After some time, however, he left Mr. Chandler to join his second
brother-in-law (John Godwin Scott.), who had set up in the north of