A host of active missionaries are now at work,
engaged in religious, moral, and sanitary teaching, in charitable
relief, or in industrial organization. But perhaps the most valuable
work has been that which has had no such directly practical object in
view, but has engaged itself in the collection of trustworthy
information. Mr Charles Booth's book, _The Labour and Life of the
People_, has an importance far in advance of that considerable attention
which it has received. Its essential value is not merely that it
supplies, for the first time, a large and carefully collected fund of
facts for the formation of sound opinions and the explosion of
fallacies, but that it lays down lines of a new branch of social study,
in the pursuit of which the most delicate intellectual interests will be
identified with a close and absorbing devotion to the practical issues
of life.
In the study of poverty, the work of Mr. Booth and his collaborators may
truly rank as an epoch-making work.
For the purpose we have immediately before us, the measurement of
poverty, the figures supplied in this book are invaluable.
Considerations of space will compel us to confine our attention to such
figures as will serve to mark the extent and meaning of city poverty in
London. But though, as will be seen, the industrial causes of London
poverty are in some respects peculiar, there is every reason to believe
that the extent and nature of poverty does not widely differ in all
large centres of population.
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