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.
The area which Mr.Booth places under microscopic observation covers Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St.George's in the East, Stepney, Mile End, Old Town, Poplar, Hackney, and comprises a population 891,539.

Of these no less than 316,000, or 35 per cent, belong to families whose weekly earnings amount to less than 21s.

This 35 per cent, compose the "poor," according to the estimate of Mr.Booth, and it will be worth while to note the social elements which constitute this class.

The "poor" are divided into four classes or strata, marked A, B, C, D.At the bottom comes A, a body of some 11,000, or 11/4 per cent, of hopeless, helpless city savages, who can only be said by courtesy to belong to the "working-classes" "Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess.