And if I felt this in an institution characterised by the humanity of the officials, how intolerable must be the bitterness of a House ruled by insentient force? I thought of Kitty standing up before the master at Tonbridge and fighting the Law, and in my first flush of recovered independence I saluted that fine old warrior battling, not for her belly alone, but for the bellies of others.

There is, I understand, a Union of Poor Law Officials, who, apart from their work of obtaining decent wages and conditions for the members, are steadily striving to alter the regulations governing casuals. In this they are helped by individual guardians. But on the whole Boards have developed little consciousness since the days of Bumble. They have no souls to save nor bodies to be kicked and, while in London, at any rate, superintendents, male and female, have lost that sense of brutal superiority condemned by Dickens, their superiors have remained untouched. In the process of economic evolution, the soul of Bumble has ascended to a higher social plane.