But though one never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing we knew we should not see--anything really great, central, of the first class, anything that humanity had adored.

And with revulsion indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.
"But you must always remember also," said Grant to me, in his heavy abstracted way, when I had urged this view, "that the very vileness of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the human soul.

I agree with you.

I agree that they have to live in something worse than barbarism.

They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization.