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16
cnism would evidently increase year by year, as the accommodation for the
poor in the centre of London becomes less and less adequate to their increasing
numbers. But the premium on unwholesome crowding is much increased
by the progress of those metropolitan works, which, however admirable in
themselves, destroy whole streets of poor houses without making any provision
for those who are displaced.

At the present moment, a bill is before parliament for making a new
railway through the poorest parts of St. Giles's. The simultaneous formation of a
handsome new street, that will involve the removal of some 200 dwelling houses,
of a kind now occupied by the very poorest people, is likely to be insisted
on by Parliament as one of the conditions for conceding this bill. At the
lowest computation 2500 persons will be displaced by this scheme.
Unless provision be simultaneously made for accommodating, either in
large central lodging houses or in the suburbs with access by railway, the
people who are thus removed, the spectacle will be repeated in St. Giles's that
has lately been seen in the East of London of a number of families wandering
about some Saturday night, with their scanty worldly goods on their backs,
without any resting place but the workhouse. Even at an advanced rent, the
people who are displaced will hardly be able to get an accommodation so good
as the meagre one they have left, and they are generally of a class ignorant
enough to be content with worse conditions of lodgement, such as will certainly