Let the reader walk with us to a fashionable clothing establishment – a mart, we believe, as it is called. The building, as you approach it, seems a palace. It is redolent with polished mahogany and plate-glass and gilt. You pass it when the lamps are lit, and you think of the Arabian Nights. It is illuminated as if peace had just been proclaimed, or some great national desire had been realised. You enter with cash, and all is fair and smooth within. Whatever you want in the way of apparel is there, and at a price for which no honest tradesman can afford to sell it. Honest! asks the reader, is not the man honest? Does he steal the cloth? Certainly not. Does he not pay rent, and taxes, and wages? Most certainly he does. Do not his creditors all get twenty shillings in the pound? Most undoubtedly they do; the law protects them, and with them the man, willing or not, must keep himself right. So far as they are concerned, honesty is the best policy. How, then, does he make his profit? How is this monster establishment maintained? Out of what fund is it that its glitter and glare are paid for? We shall now see. Come down this stinking court. Go up those creaking stairs. Enter that miserable garret. Look at those men, who know nothing of labour but its curse, and of life but its misery. Mark the haggard faces already stamped with the impress of death. If you can bear the polluted atmosphere, you will hear from these men how they toil from early morning far into the night for two shillings a day; how for them the fine air and the golden sunshine, and the rest of the sabbath, exist not; and it is by them, by their sweat and blood and sinew, that the profit is made. And now go back and look into the gilded shop, and it will seem to you a Golgotha – a place of skulls. Is another illustration needed? Up in yon miserable chamber, without fire – without food – without furniture – almost without clothes, Martha Duke is stitching to earn the few pence by which she prolongs life, and its misery. Once, youth was hers, with its bright hopes and joys; but they are gone, and with an aching heart and pallid brow she plies her daily task. Is it wonderful that, wanting coals or something better than dry bread, the shirt or the waistcoat should be pawned? Is it not more wonderful that such bleak and hopeless poverty should be so honest as it is? And yet from such poor forlorn, forgotten women as these, proceed the profits which pay for dazzling window and gorgeous pile. Is it strange that the city missionaries for last year show an increase of fallen women in their districts of 1035?

Bear in mind also that corporal labourers are shorter lived and endure more physical evil than the mental labourers. The coal-whippers’ work – the most wasteful, unscientific, and pernicious expenditure of human muscle ever devised, writes Dr Chambers – overstrains the fibres of the heart, and the organs become diseased. Painters again are liable to palsy and colic, from the use of white lead. The tailor sits till the stomach and bowels becomes disordered, the spine twisted, the gait shambling, and the power of taking the exercise necessary to health obliterated. Shoemakers and bootmakers suffer equally from a constrained position and the pressure of the last against the stomach. Heart-burn and indigestion are so common among them, that a pill in the Pharmacopeia is called the cobbler’s pill. Then there is the baker’s malady, which carries off a large proportion of its victims. Dressmakers are peculiarly subject to the attacks of consumption; workwomen constantly suffer from varicose veins.

There are two worlds in London, with a gulf between – the rich and the poor. We have glanced at the latter; for the sake of contrast let us look at the former. Emerson says the wealth of London determines prices all over the globe. The revenue of the corporation of the city of London for 1856 was £2,595,216 16s. 4½d. In 1853 the money coined in the mint was £11,952,391 in gold, and £701,544 in silver. The business of the Bank of England is conducted by about 800 clerks, whose salaries amount to about £200,000. The Bank in 1857 had £26,683,790 bank notes in circulation. In the same year there were about 5 millions deposited in the Savings Banks of the metropolis. The gross Customs revenue of the port of London in 1849 was £11,070,176. 65 millions is the estimate formed by Mr M‘Culloch of the total value of the produce conveyed into and from London. The gross rental as assessed by the property and income tax is 12½ millions. The gross property insured is £166,000,000, and only two-fifths of the houses are insured. The amount of capital at the command of the entire London bankers may be estimated at 64 millions; the insurance companies have always 10 millions of deposits ready for investment. 78 millions are employed in discounts. In 1841 the transactions of one London house amounted to 30 millions. In 1840 the payments made in the clearing house were £974,580,600, – an enormous sum, which will appear still greater when we remember all sums under £100 are omitted from this statement. All this business cannot be carried on without a considerable amount of eating and drinking. The population consumes annually 277,000 bullocks, 30,000 calves, 1,480,000 sheep, 34,000 pigs, 1,600,000 quarters of wheat, 310,464,000 pounds of potatoes, 89,672,000 cabbages. Of fish the returns are almost incredible. Besides, it eats 2,742,000 fowls, 1,281,000 game. Exclusive of those brought from the different parts of the united kingdom, from 70 to 75 millions of eggs are annually imported into London from France and other countries. About 13,000 cows are kept in the city and its environs for the supply of milk and cream; and if we add to their value that of the cheese, and butter, and milk, brought from the country into the city, the expenditure on dairy produce must be enormous. Then London consumes 65,000 pipes of wine, 2,000,000 gallons of spirits, 43,200,000 gallons of porter and ale, and burns 3,000,000 tons of coal; and I have seen it estimated that one-fourth of the commerce of the nation is carried on in its port. On Boxing Night it was estimated that 60,000 persons visited the various theatres and places of amusement in London. In 1856, 361,714 persons visited the British Museum; 161,764, Hampton Court; 344,140 went to Kew Gardens. The total number of bathers in the Serpentine were 20,000 persons. On the last Derby, the South Western Company alone conveyed 37,700 passengers. In London in 1853, according to Sir R. Mayne, there were 3613 beer shops, 5279 public houses, 13 wine rooms. The theatres and saloons licensed by the Lord Chamberlain are, the Haymarket Theatre, Adelphi, Olympic, Princess’s, Strand, Surrey, Queen’s, Soho, City of London, Marylebone, Standard, Pavilion, Victoria, Sadler’s Wells, St James’s, Lyceum, Astley’s, Her Majesty’s, Drury Lane, Grecian Saloon, Albert, Britannia, Bower, Earl of Effingham. Literary Institutions shut up. The Great Globe itself is a doubtful property. That beautiful building, the Panopticon in Leicester-square, was a failure, and the Adelaide Gallery has long been closed. An attempt was made to form an educational association in Charing Cross, where, by means of a library and cheap lectures, the popular mind could be improved and instructed and amused, but the attempt did not succeed; dancing, drinking, theatrical representations, – most of them adaptations from the French, – music, are the only pleasures which a London population cared for. Even as in the old Hebrew days, Wisdom lifts up her voice in our streets, and no man regards her testimony.

And now to guard all this wealth, to preserve all this mass of industry honest, and to keep down all this crime, what have we? 5847 police, costing £434,081, 13 police courts, costing £67,006, and about a dozen criminal prisons; 69 union relieving officers, 316 officers of local boards, and 1256 other local officers. We have 35 weekly magazines, 9 daily newspapers, 5 evening, 72 weekly ones. Independently of the mechanics’ institutions, colleges, and endowed schools, we have 14,000 children of both sexes clothed and educated gratis, and the National and British and Foreign Schools in all parts of London, and Sunday schools. We have Bartholomew’s Hospital, relieving, in 1856, in-patients 5933, out-patients 78,443; Guy’s Hospital; St Thomas’s, with 4531 in-patients, outpatients, 34,281; St George’s; the Middlesex, last year relieving 2268 in-patients, and 16,844 out-patients; the London, the King’s College, the University College, and many more. In the Cancer Hospital last year 2500 patients were treated: then there are Bedlam, the Foundling Hospital, the Philanthropic Institution, the Magdalen. In the report of the Statistical Society of London it is stated that 14 general hospitals in London possess an income from realised property to the amount of £109,687; annual subscriptions, £17,091; donations, £16,636; legacies, £10,206; and their miscellaneous sources of income to £1996. The total income of all these hospitals from every source is £155,616; and the annual contributions of the public amount to £45,929. In addition to the above hospitals there are in this metropolis 36 special hospitals, possessing an aggregate income of £117,218; making the income of the general and special hospitals taken together amount to £272,834. There are also returns from 42 general dispensaries, possessing incomes from all sources of £21,000; and 18 special dispensaries, with annual incomes of £8064. If these two sums, making £29,064, be added to the former, it gives the enormous amount of £301,898 annually expended in medical charities in this metropolis; and this sum, large as it is, excludes Samaritan and other funds connected with hospitals and dispensaries, poor-law medical relief (£28,776), cost of maintenance of pauper lunatics (£79,988), vaccination (£4292), and nurses’ training institutions. All these sums would make a grand total of nearly half a million expended on our sick poor. The City Missionaries now number 325, and every missionary visits once a month about 500 families or 2800 persons. The Ragged School Union has its ramifications in every part of the metropolis. Their returns are 128 Sunday Schools with 16,937 scholars in attendance; 98 day ditto, with 13,057; 117 evening schools with 8085; and 84 industrial classes with 3224. London has 12 societies for the reformation of life and public morals with a total income of £11,583; 18 for reclaiming the fallen, and staying the progress of crime, with £35,036; 14 for the relief of general destitution and distress, with £23,880; 12 for the relief of specified distress, with £29,881; 14 for aiding the resources of the industrious, with £7246; 11 for the blind, deaf, and dumb, with £34,762; 103 colleges, hospitals, and other asylums for the aged (exclusive of Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals, £83,047); 16 charitable pension societies, with £18,989; 74 charitable and provident societies, chiefly for specified classes, with £103,227; 31 asylums for orphans and other necessitous children, with £81,015; 10 educational foundations, exclusive of libraries, modern colleges, or proprietary schools, £93,112; 4 charitable ditto, with £13,300; 40 school societies, religious book, church-aiding, and Christian instructing, irrespective of government grants or establishments, with an income, taking the sale of publications, as much as £318,189. Mr Low gives the total number of charitable institutions as 500; Mr Mayhew puts down their number as 530. Then there are 100 temperance meetings held weekly. May we not hope that all these institutions have some effect, that by means of them some are reclaimed, and many saved?

The more direct religious agency may be estimated as follows. In the Handbook to Places of Worship, published by Low, in 1851, there is a list of 371 churches and chapels in connexion with the Establishment; the number of church sittings, according to Mr Mann, is 409,184; the Independents have about 140 places of worship and 100,436 sittings; the Baptists, 130 chapels, and accommodation for 54,234; the Methodists, 154 chapels, 60,696; the Presbyterians, 23 chapels and 18,211 sittings; the Unitarians, 9 chapels and about 3300 sittings; the Roman Catholics, 35 chapels and 35,994 sittings; 4 Quaker chapels, with sittings for 3151; the Moravians have two chapels, with 1100 sittings; the Jews have 11 synagogues and 3692 sittings. There are 94 chapels belonging to the New Church, the Plymouth Brethren, the Irvingites, the Latter-Day Saints, Sandemanians, Lutherans, French Protestants, Greeks, Germans, Italians, which chapels have sittings for 18,833. We thus get 691,723 attendants on divine exercises.

Those who know London life will know that I have not glanced at its darkest side: any man of the world will tell you infamies which I may not name here. I do not go so far as Mr Patmore, and affirm that in the higher ranks of life a young man is obliged to keep a mistress to avoid being laughed at; but I can conceive of no city more sunk in licentiousness and rascality than ours. Paris, Hamburgh, Vienna, may be as bad, but they cannot be worse. The poor are looked after by the police – visited by the city missionary; their wants and woes are worked up into newspaper articles, and they live as it were in houses of glass. It is true that one half the world does not know how the other half lives; but it is not true in the sense in which it is generally affirmed. Who ever has an idea that a pious baronet, taking the chair at a religious meeting in Exeter Hall, will prove a felon; that that house, eminent in the mercantile and philanthropic world, will sanction the circulation of forged Dock warrants; that that manager, about to engage in prayer at a meeting of directors, will turn out to be the manager of the greatest swindle of modern times? Who sees a dishonoured suicide in the patriotic Sadleir, or in the philanthropic Redpath a convict for life, or in the dashing Robson a maniac? If I tell you that respectable old gentleman now coming out of his club is going to inspect a fresh victim, whom some procuress has lured with devilish art, you will tell me that I am uncharitable; or if I point you to that well-appointed equipage in the Park, and tell you that that fair young girl that sits within has crushed many a young wife’s heart, and has sent many a man to the devil before his time, you will tell me I exaggerate: I do nothing of the kind. If I were to tell what most men know – what everyone knows, except those whose business it is to know it, and to seek to reform it – I should be charged with indelicacy, as if truth could be indelicate, and my book perhaps suppressed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice – if that abortion exists still. We are choked up with cant; almost everything we believe in is a lie. The prayer of Ajax should be ours, – Light – more light.

What are we to do? – to stand stock still, looking to heaven “with a frenzied air, as if to ask if a God were there?” One can almost believe, with George Gilfillan, that the earth needs a new gospel and a new manifestation of divine power. From this low estate who is to rescue us? Not the aristocracy, a barbarous institution, perpetrating barbarous ideas in our midst, – that work is not honourable; whereas all true civilization points us to the fact, that man is only happy and virtuous as he is steadily industrious; and thus our most uncivilized classes are our upper and lower, – our lords and ladies on one side, and our rogues and prostitutes on the other. Not our law-makers, who imprison our young lads in costly jails, where the criminals have luxuries denied to the poor; and then in Newgate, or at the public works, mix them all up together, that the comparatively innocent may learn to be adepts in crime. Not our religious, I fear, when, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to Dr Cumming, the cry is, If you have a proper translation of the Bible you will destroy the faith of the people. Not our trading classes, becoming richer and more sunk in flunkeyism every day. But it may be that these —

 
“Are graves from which a glorious phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.”
 

Whom am I to blame? Not the victims, but the fathers, and mothers, and divines, and schoolmasters, and governing classes. Father, you have given your bold, manly son an emasculated religion, – a religion that wilfully shuts its eyes, and will not look upon life as it is; and, immediately he goes into the world, away vanish all the pasteboard defences with which you childishly sought to guard him; and yet you will not confess that in inculcating religious creeds, – that in teaching children catechisms, – that in vaguely telling them to be good, – that in leading them to believe in forms rather than truths, you are only damming up for a while the passionate impulses of young blood, that they may ultimately exert a more tumultuous and irresistible sway. You take the little Arab of the streets, and, for acts of levity and wantonness which all boys commit, you send him to prison, at an age when you confess he is not a responsible creature, and then idiotically wonder that he turns out a criminal, and that he wars with society till he is hanged. You are surprised that woman, fond of praise, of dress, and pleasure, should prefer to walk the street in silk and satin, to have a short life and a merry one, rather than slave and drudge, and end her days after all in a workhouse. You tone down your fashionably educated daughters into automatons, and then wonder that hot youth finds domestic life tame and dull. Above all, do not go away with the idea that we have reached the utmost height of civilization, – that we are a model people, – that it is our mission to set up as teachers of religion to all mankind. Let us remember that the increase of crime and dissipation are facts; that there can be no corrupter city than London, and that it must be so, so long as we make professions our practice so scandalously denies. I have heard Her Majesty’s proclamation against vice and immorality read at quarter-sessions by men in whose reading it became a farce which the most ignorant bumpkin in court could relish. Now we are going to do wonders, the policeman is to supplement the parson, the wicked are to be hunted down. Is this the way seriously to set about moral reform? Routine and officialism in church and state have made the outside of the sepulchre white enough; do we not need a little cleansing within? How long will men look for grapes from thorns?