INTEODUCTION

The papers composing this book were contributed to Scrihner's
Magazine during- the years 1891-1893 by authors whose work em¬
bodied personal experience and close and sympathetic study, and
by artists whose drawings were made among the life they repre¬
sent. They form perhaps the most important group of essays thus
far printed upon one of the most vital and (what is by no means the
same thing) one of the most widely discussed subjects of the time.
It is, indeed, the central subject of all social questions ; for all of
these, under whatever name, deal with the means of improving the
conditions of life and with the relief of suffering as the necessary
forerunners of all other reforms; and whatever may be the diffi¬
culties of those conditions, or the amount of that suffering in rural
communities or among special classes away from towns, it is only
in the centres of population that they present their great general
problems to the observation of all people alike, and compel an
answer to the question of their remedy.

Any series of papers on the Poor in Great Cities will have had
manj^ predecessors—has indeed in Englai;id a whole literature be¬
hind it, of whose masterpieces some show their practical results to¬
day in different individual directions, and some have become, so to
speak, the literary classics of their subject. The famous series in
the London Morning Chronicle in 1848, on " London Labor and the
London Poor" (perhaps the first to attract wide attention), the
" Parson Lot " papers of Charles Kingsley, the publications of the
group of men of whom Frederick Maurice was the centre, and a
long succession down to the " Bitter Cry of Outcast London " in our