Page:Our Common Land (and other short essays).djvu/68

 badly-built rooms, among scenes of pauperism, crime, and vice. And we each of us think it is only the two shillings and sixpence, only the shilling for this or that perfectly justifiable object we have given. I have sometimes wanted to move some widow and her children to the North, where the children would learn a trade and support themselves well, where the woman would find much more work at washing and charring, and where the family would have a cottage healthy and spacious, instead of the one close room. The widow has been a little fearful of making so important a step. If the guardians, if the clergy, if, above all, the visitors, have let the need of work teach its own natural lesson, that family has removed and has been happy and independent. I have now several such well established in the North. But if the various donors have broken in with their miserable pittances of fixed or desultory relief, the family, in poverty and uncertainty of income, have dragged on here in London. In