"May I submit to the charitable feelings of your Lordship, and to the Committee of the Mansion House Relief Fund, the sad state of our starving people.

"I am not going to furnish you with a state of things which have their existence in my imagination. Like the poor people themselves, I would rather conceal their poverty than paint it in its horrible reality.

"The landlords here are giving no work except to the process-server; the poor have no credit, and the father and mother are in hopeless want of work, and their children in want of bread. I know of thirty-three homes—if, indeed, a tenement without a window could be called a home—in which there is neither food nor fire. I may say there are 15 of these in extreme want. Instance the following:—Yesterday evening I was called on to visit a patient. When I reached the hovel it was not dark, yet the family, seven in all, were in bed; and why? because they had eaten the scanty fare they collected during the clay, they had no fire to warm them, and their remedy was page 44 to lie in a cold room, on cold beds, with, cold, empty stomach; and I fear my patient is a cold corpse now amongst them; and if I was constituted judge and jury over the cause of her death, my verdict would be 'want of food.' Such, and like pressing cases, I submit to the consideration of your Lordship.