'Within so many yards of this Covent-garden lodging of mine, as within so many yards of
Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, the Prisons, the
Courts of Justice, all the Institutions that govern the land, I can find - MUST find,
whether I will or no - in the open streets, shameful instances of neglect of children,
intolerable toleration of the engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched
and destructive cripples both in body and mind, a misery to themselves, a misery to the
community, a disgrace to civilisation, and an outrage on Christianity. - I know it to be a
fact as easy of demonstration as any sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that
if the State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the strong
hand take those children out of the streets, while they are yet children, and wisely train
them, it would make them a part of England's glory, not its shame - of England's strength,
not its weakness - would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens, and many
great men, out of the seeds of its criminal population. Yet I go on bearing with the
enormity as if it were nothing, and I go on reading the Parliamentary Debates as if they
were something, and I concern myself far more about one railway- bridge across a public
thoroughfare, than about a dozen generations of scrofula, ignorance, wickedness,
prostitution, poverty, and felony. I can slip out at my door, in the small hours after any
midnight, and, in one circuit of the purlieus of Covent-garden Market, can behold a state
of infancy and youth, as vile as if a Bourbon sat upon the English throne; a great police
force looking on with authority to do no more than worry and hunt the dreadful vermin
into corners, and there leave them. Within the length of a few streets I can find a
workhouse, mismanaged with that dull short-sighted obstinacy that its greatest
opportunities as to the children it receives are lost, and yet not a farthing saved to any
one. But the wheel goes round, and round, and round; and because it goes round - so I am
told by the politest authorities - it goes well.'
Thus I reflected, one day in the Whitsun week last past, as I floated down the Thames
among the bridges, looking - not inappropriately - at the drags that were hanging up at
certain dirty stairs to hook the drowned out, and at the numerous conveniences provided
to facilitate their tumbling in. My object in that uncommercial journey called up another
train of thought, and it ran as follows:
'When I was at school, one of seventy boys, I wonder by what secret understanding our
attention began to wander when we had pored over our books for some hours. I wonder
by what ingenuity we brought on that confused state of mind when sense became
nonsense, when figures wouldn't work, when dead languages wouldn't construe, when
live languages wouldn't be spoken, when memory wouldn't come, when dulness and
vacancy wouldn't go. I cannot remember that we ever conspired to be sleepy after dinner,
or that we ever particularly wanted to be stupid, and to have flushed faces and hot beating
heads, or to find blank hopelessness and obscurity this afternoon in what would become
perfectly clear and bright in the freshness of to-morrow morning. We suffered for these
things, and they made us miserable enough. Neither do I remember that we ever bound
ourselves by any secret oath or other solemn obligation, to find the seats getting too hard
