THE STREETS OF LONDON.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIII, Issue 7938, 11 January 1906, Page 3

THE STREETS OF LONDON.

A CONTRAST. ' "The streets of London," what coald tbey not reveal? Picadilly m the west, under a lovely summ"er sunset, in the height of *he season, and Dorset Street, Spitflelds, in the east within three miles of each other I White ties and evening dress in the one: rags, filth, and crime in the other. Hail a passing hansom at yonr club door, and drive to Spitalflelds Church. In half an hour you have left luxury behind. You have come to squalor and vice. You have left men who, corn with a silver spoon in their mouths, have hardly ever done a day's work; you have come among men who have done less —the only point of similarity between them—men, who, treacherous and oarnivorous as a panther, have lived upon their fellow creatures. If you have a guide—and a guide is necessary—a police officer recently pensioned, before drink and freedom from the accustomed discipline have started him on a downward career, is the most suitable—teil him to show yuu the worst of it. He will show you streets which constables never enter alone, but patrol in couples, as lawless as the streets of Omduiman; houses as foul as those abutting on the "Houses of Stone," from which inmates are driven out by the vermin to sleep on he pavement—and all* this withip seven minutes' walk of the Mansion House, the abode of'the LordJMayor of London. Were it a night in the depths of winter, with the rain descending in torrents, and the cold, pitiless blast sweeping everything before it. you would see nothing perhaps so repulsive, but to a sensitive mind somo-thing-inflnitely more touching; children of tender years, with scarcely a rag to cover thorn, huddled together in doorways, children sent out nightly to beg, and afraid to return home, without a place to lay their heads, save a frowsy den with the bare boards for a pillow; children to whom, even when stricken with sickness, a warm bed and a kind word are unknown. Then, perhaps, you might realise the hopeless misery and shocking de pravity of the cnJd, wet, shelterless, night mid "Streets of London"!—« Blackwood's Magazine.