The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound tobe dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.

If, in all the cities, every house that is past repairing could be pulled down or burned up, how great would be the crash, how heaven-high the conflagration. It would be a veritable crack of Doom and glare of the Judgment.

... we can bear with great philosophy the sufferings of others, especially if we do not actually see them.

It hurts me to hear the tone in which the poor are condemned as shiftless, or having a pauper spirit, just as it would if a crowd mocked at a child for its weakness, or laughed at a lame man because he could not run, or a blind man because he stumbled.

... we see the poor as a mass of shadow, painted in one flat grey wash, at the remote edges of our sunshine.

Several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity.

One of the saddest sights of the slums is to see the thrifty wife of the working man, with her rosy brood of children, used to country air and sunshine, used to space, privacy, good surroundings, cleanliness, quiet, shut up amid the noise and dirt and confusion, in the gloom of the slum.

... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. Miserable covers many shabby most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, disagreeable includes them all.