the brow of the hill of age instead of crossing it, and retraced their steps, until they arrived back again at thirteen, the old, old heads planted on the young shoulders revealing the "secret." This, the most melancholy type of the grown-up, neglected infant, is, however, by no means the most painful of those that come trooping past in such a mighty hurry (p. 16).

Then follow the different classes of these poor children, for they are little more; some "dogged and sullen-looking," some ailing and sickly looking, some "flashy and flaunting"; which last, if properly trained, would "grow to be clever, capable women, women of spirit and courage and shrewd discernment"; but who are "the curse and bane of workrooms, crowded with juvenile stickers or pasters or workers in flowers or beads." These, however, are not, according to our author, the neglected children; they are their mothers. Whatever has been said to the contrary, the estate of matrimony among this class is not lightly esteemed; one indication of this is the custom of hanging up the "marriage lines" under the clock, which is said to be "lucky." But marriage is not common, on account of the expense.

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Chapter III., one of the most depressing of all, is on Farming." It seems to be a regular trade in London, and Mr. Greenwood declares that there is a class of newspapers in which the baby-farmers constantly advertise. "As I write, one of these

newspapers lies before me. It is a daily paper, and its circulation, an extensive one, is essentially among the working class, especially among working girls and women." This is shown by the style of its advertisements. "Column after column tells of the wants of servants and masters. "Cap hands," "feather hands," "artificial flower hands," "chenille hands," "hands for the manufacture of chignons and hair-nets, and bead work, and all manner of plaiting, and quilting, and gauffering in ribbon and net and muslin"; and mixed with these are the advertisements by which "the baby-farmer fishes wholesale for customers." Of these specimens are given. Children are taken to nurse for a few pence a day, or they are "adopted," to be fed, clothed, educated, and nursed in sickness and health for from twelve to fifteen pounds. The children we may hope, as a general rule, are speedily released by death. Greenwood believes "a large proportion of the young human Pariahs that haunt London streets were children abandoned and left to their fate by mock adopters.'" Mothers are tempted, by flattering promises for the children, and by the hope of escaping absolute ruin, to have recourse to them, and often pay more than they can afford; but the happiest of the children are those which are practically murdered out of hand. Mr. Greenwood gives a curious account of his answering one of the advertisements himself, and afterwards visiting the place, where he found a "pipe-smoking, beer-swigging, unshaven, dirty, lazy ruffian, nursing a poor little

Mr.

creature less than a year old, as I should judge, with its small, pinched face reposing against his ragged waistcoat." "It would appear too much like piling up the agony' did I attempt to describe that baby's face. It was that of an infant that had cried itself to sleep, and to whom pain was so familiar that it invaded its dreams, causing its mites of features to twitch and quiver, so that it would have been a mercy to wake it." We have no room for the details of the visit to this wretched haunt.

The fourth chapter passes from infants to working boys, their "drudgery and privations, their temptations," &c. In every poor London district there is a "penny gaff," an illegal theatre expressly for children. The plays appeal to the most natural taste of young people, the taste for adventure, and enlist it on the side of vice, for the heroes are thieves, the heroines prostitutes. The author gives a graphic account of the details of a visit to one of these hideous dens, for which we must refer to his volume.

We now follow him to the second curse, "Professional Thieves." Statistics,' he says, "show that one person in a hundred and fifty among us is a forger, a housebreaker, a pickpocket, a shoplifter, a receiver of stolen goods, or what not, a human bird of prey, in short.' "No life," he adds, "is more miserable than this."

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Anybody would think, to hear 'em talk," a thief once remarked to me, "that it was all sugar with us while we were free, and that our sufferings did not begin till we were caught and 'put away.' Them that think so know nothing about it. Take a case now, of a man who is for getting his living' on the cross,' and who has got a 'kid' or two, and their mother at home. I don't say that it is my case, but you can take it so if you like. She isn't a thief. Ask her what she knows about me, and she'll tell you that, worse luck, I've got in co. with some bad 'uns, and she wishes I hadn't. She wishes I hadn't, p'raps, not out of any sort of Goody Twoshoes feeling, but because she loves me. That's the name of it; we haint got any other name for the feelin' and she can't bear to think that I may any hour be dragged off, for six months or a year, p'raps. And them's my feelings, too, and no mistake, day after day, and Sundays as well as week days. She isn't fonder of me than I am of her, I'll go bail for that; and as for the kids, the girl especially, why I'd skid a waggon wheel with my body, rather than her precious skin should be grazed. Well, take my word for it, I never go out in the morning, and the young 'un sez' good bye,' but what I think, 'good bye-yes! p'raps it's good bye for a longer spell than you're dreaming about, you poor little shaver.' And when I get out into the street, how long am I safe? Why, only for the straight length of that street, as far as I can see the coast clear. I may find a stopper at any turning or at any corner. And when you do feel a hand on your collar! I've often wondered what must be a chap's feelings when the white cap is pulled over his peepers, and old Calcraft is pawing about his throat, to get the rope right. It must be a sight worse than the other feeling, you'll say. Well, if it is, I wonder how long the chap manages to hold up till he's let go!" (p. 90.)

This, the writer says, was really said to himself, "not by an incarcerated rogue, plying 'gammon,' as the incarcerated rogue loves to ply it," but by "a thief in possession of liberty." He adds: "I never saw the adage, suspicion always haunts the guilty mind, so painfully illustrated as in the thieves' quarter, by the faces of grey-haired criminals, whose hearts had been worn into hardness by the dishonouring chains of transportation."

He paints with great force the extreme difficulty of the position of a convicted thief on leaving prison; the almost impossibility of his recovering himself, however hearty may be his wish to do so. He believes that one main obstacle to his recovery is that "they have no faith in the sincerity, honesty, or goodness of human nature"; "they believe people in general to be no better than themselves, and that most people will do a wrong thing if it serves their purpose." He protests against the proposal that they should be branded before leaving prison, and that the mark should be taken as proof of a former conviction. He wholly, and we think on good grounds, throws overboard Lord Shaftesbury's account of the amount of gain made by thieves. In discussing this he goes back to a subject which would have come more naturally under his first head-the juvenile thieves, many of them brought up by their fathers to the trade. He rather weakens this part of his subject, in our opinion, by bringing in, in the middle of his discussion of it, the subject of dishonest traders, adulterators of food, &c. That many of these are quite as bad as professional thieves, perhaps worse, and with much less excuse, we are very sure. But the nature of their temptations, their actual position before the law, and the means which may be used to stop the evil, are so wholly different, that by mixing them together he makes it, we think, more difficult for his readers to consider what practical method can be adopted to lessen the number of "professional thieves" in London. Two very important practical remarks he does make; the first is, that expense is no real reason against adopting any method which really promises to succeed, because the present system of leaving the professional thieves to prey upon society when they are at liberty, and from time to time seizing, trying, and imprisoning them, really costs more in mere money than any plan which can be adopted to meet the evil. The other is Lord Romilly's suggestion (how far our author supports it we are not sure), that the children of professional thieves should be taken from them for education.

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One most important subject, which he places in quite a new light, is that our laws, as at present administered, tolerate the existence of a whole literature, the almost avowed object of which is to inspire boys and girls with the desire to become thieves. year ago, he says, he "fished in one day, out of one little newsvendor's shop situated in the nice convenient neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, which, more than any other quarter of the metropolis,

6

is crowded with working children of both sexes, twenty-three samples of this gallows literature, all thrilling romances addressed to boys, and circulated entirely among them-and girls.' The articles before him contained "The Skeleton Band," "Tyburn Dick," "The Black Knight of the Road," "Dick Turpin," "The Boy Burglar," and "Starlight Sall." He adds:-"It is altogether a mistake, however, to suppose that the poison-publisher's main element of success consists in his glorification of robbers and cutthroats. To be sure he can by no means afford to dispense with the ingredients mentioned in the concoction of his vile brew, but his first and foremost reliance is on lewdness. Everything is subservient to this." The author goes on to show this as far as can be done without tainting his book, which he avoids with laudable care. And he concludes by asking what security any man can have that such papers may not come into the hands even of his own children, considering that "at least a quarter of a million of these penny numbers are sold weekly," and that even "in quiet, suburban neighbourhoods, far removed from the stews of London and the pernicious atmosphere they engender; in serene and peaceful semicountry towns, where genteel boarding-schools flourish, there may almost invariably be found some small shopkeeper, who" weekly circulates them to "well-dressed little customers.'

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We have no space to enlarge upon the remaining "curses," as we have on the two first. They are "Professional Beggars,' "Fallen Women," "Drunkenness," "Betting Gamblers," and the "Waste of Charity." The passages we had marked under these heads are no less important than those we have already quoted, but for them we must refer our readers to the book itself. To one point only we must call attention. He says:- "Whatever differences of opinion may arise as to the extent and evil operation of the other curses that affect the city of London in common with other great cities, no sane man will contest the fact, that drunkenness has wrought more mischief than all other social evils put together." This statement, of course, we are accustomed to see everywhere. But our author calls special attention to the fact, that "for one victim to alcohol, two might be reckoned who have come to their death-bed' through the various poisons which it is the publican's custom to mix with his liquors to give them a fictitious strength and fire"; and then follow some pages devoted to a mere list of the poisons which our poorer fellow-subjects are daily consuming under the name of beer. We are sure that this subject deserves much more attention than it has yet received, not merely as a financial or sanitary question, nor merely as a fraud which ought to be punished, but even more as one which causes extensive moral evil. Why is it, that the working classes of England are so much more in danger of getting drunk upon beer than those of France, Italy, Spain, &c., upon wine? Drunkenness, no doubt, is the special

temptation of northern countries. Let that fact, however, account for the mischief wrought by gin. Beer is not, any more than wine, to be classed with ardent spirits. Yet the effects of beer in England are confessedly far worse than those of wine in France. We believe the real explanation of this to be its adulteration. It is by drinking, at first in moderation, adulterated beer, that the habit of intoxication becomes a slavery, by which men are afterwards led into the abuse of gin. There are at this moment thousands of habitual drunkards around us, who would never have been drunkards if they had not been betrayed into the snare by drinking, in moderation, adulterated beer-that is, if the beer sold in public-houses were not adulterated. We insist upon this, because it is an evil which the law might uproot; and to allow the continuance of which is to suffer a pit to be dug, and then artfully covered over, in the very path of our labouring classes. That a very large proportion of the drunkenness of England is to be attributed to this cause is proved, we think, by the fact that in Germany, where the climate tempts at least as strongly to this vice as it does here, it is by no means so common, one chief difference between the two countries being that the common drink of the working classes there is a weak, unadulterated beer. This evil at least, law, well administered, might meet. At this moment the great diminution of the number of beer-houses which we trust Mr. Gladstone's Government will make, can hardly be opposed except on the ground of vested interests. Why, at least, should it not be enacted, as the penalty on conviction for selling adulterated beer, that the keeper of the house should be disqualified to hold a license, and the house itself disqualified from being licensed? No man certainly can have acquired a vested interest in any right to cheat or poison his neighbours, else nothing could be more unjust than our "Habitual Criminals Act," the very idea of which is to prevent the commission of theft by men who have, by long custom, acquired a "vested interest" in it. Under such a law as we suggest, it would be to the interest of the owners of these houses (very generally brewers) to see that their tenants did not pois on their customers. And, considering the advanced state of chemical science among us, it is absurd to suppose that if the Government was determined that so it should be, the selling of adulterated beer might easily be made so dangerous a trade as to be very soon given over. We believe that no one measure would do more to lessen the national curse of drunkenness.

But, alas! although details like this are not to be neglected, how little, after all, can legislation do towards the removal of these "seven curses"! Here it is that Mr. Greenwood's book is disappointing. It is like the roll of the Prophet, written within and without; full of "lamentation and mourning and woe. woe." We do not see how any decent person can read it without feeling ashamed