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 shillings her sodden brute of a husband will at length hand her for a week’s shopping: the weary old couple who have seen better days, and now pass in silence through the babel of vulgarity: the haggard-faced widow in mouldy black who hides her paltry Sunday dinner in a worn bag: the eager eyes of the poorer hawkers, which light up pathetically when a penny comes their way: the men whose faces change at a drunken jibe into such faces as we have seen behind the bars of a cage in a zoological garden, and the crowd of men, women, and children rushing to enjoy the gratuitous spectacle of a fight: the cheap, middle-aged prostitute, whose features are a caricature of the features of woman.

You may see these things in all parts of London—north, south, east, and west—every Saturday evening, and many other evenings, all the year round. You may see them in all the other large towns and cities of Britain, and the cities of France and Germany and the United States and all other “great civilisations.” I have studied them on Saturday nights in half the cities of Britain: in Amsterdam and Brussels and Cologne, in Paris and Nice, in Venice and Rome and Naples, in New York and Chicago: and in the light of our historical research one sees their ancestors in all the great cities of all the great civilisations that ever were. As it was in the beginning. . . But that refers to the glory of God.

Follow to their homes these more pathetic figures of a London crowd. You need not do so literally,