One day! In all their lives, one day! And for the rest of
the days, as the boy told a certain bishop, "At ten we 'ops the wag; at
thirteen we nicks things; an' at sixteen we bashes the copper." Which is
to say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen are
sufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen.
The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who
set out to walk to the forest. They walked and walked through the never-
ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they sat down
at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind woman who
brought them back. Evidently they had been overlooked by the people who
try to help.
The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in
Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children,
between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses. And he
adds: "It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze of
streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky
and field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physically
unfit."
He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a
married couple.
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