I am convinced that many of the lower public-houses simply play into the hands of the harlot, and that the marked development of the public-house is due to the homelessness of our people. Alderman Thompson has pointed out in "The Housing Handbook" the existence of a universal house famine. He says: "Putting the case in its simplest form, we find, in the first place, that if every room, good and bad, occupied or unoccupied, in all the workmen's dwellings in the country be reckoned as existing accommodation, there are not enough _of any sort_ to house the working population without unhealthy overcrowding.... In the second place, we find that, so far from new rooms being built in sufficient quantities to make up the deficiency, there is a distinct lessening in the rate of increase" ("Housing Handbook," W. Thompson, pp. 1-2). This _total_ overcrowding accounts for the pressure on Shelters and common lodging-houses and tramp wards. Numbers in London are _refused admission_ to tramp wards; numbers sleep out.[155] Inevitably the class that can pay least, or cannot pay at all, will be crowded out, if house accommodation is scanty, and this will especially be the case with the migrating "out-of-work" who has no particular claim on any one. Even if he has money in his pocket, it is difficult to say whether he is not in as grave danger, moral and sanitary, if forced to be a lodger in some already overcrowded home, as if forced into the common lodging-house. Like a sponge, a slum neighbourhood sucks up by overcrowding in winter those who in summer obtain varied occupation far and wide. Is it any wonder that the children of such overcrowded homes, deprived of the joys of nature, succumb to the attractions of the brilliantly lighted street? If the predatory female nightly angles there, in all the attraction of her tawdry finery; if large numbers of men, divorced from home ties, are there to be angled for, and money can freely be obtained, the customary "drink" being proffered; what wonder if the home itself becomes insipid, if the husband seeks the flaring and enticing public-house or not less fatal club, and the wife seeks _him_--or some other man--in the same places, while the children, never at home if they can help it (for home means unpleasantness, or inconvenient toil), walk out with one another in the dangerous thoroughfare, and learn in mere boyhood and girlhood the fascination of passion without responsibility?