But why, because an outcast is a woman, should she be debarred from opportunity to make a living? Any one of the women with whom I came in contact⁠—I do not include the little prostitutes⁠—provided with a week’s respite, in decent conditions, afforded the opportunity to wash their rags, to mend their clothes and regain something of the human attributes of their beginnings, would emerge a different creature. But no! it does not matter what happens to the woman derelict; the policy seems to be that the sooner she dies of starvation and exposure the better for society.

There is no need, human or economic, to salve her. She is of no account. But save the man! Use the casual wards. Inspect the lodging houses. Throw open the kindly doors of a comfortably equipped hostel, and the Government shall escape the castigation they so merit. Apart from the Salvation Army, and one or two other bodies, the woman outcast in the London streets today is as derelict as the woman of Hood’s great lines.