The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-06-21
ALONE IN LONDON.
THE BITTER STRUGGLE WITH
 POVERTY
Of TweIve-Yenr-oId Child Born in
 the Slums.


 our columns yesterday contained thu story of a little London girl beyond al words melancholy in its incidence, bu at the same time, we fear, of constant occurrence. Jessie Smiths tale, told by
 her own little starved lips, Is, however
 not less full of grave subjects for re. fiectiOn because it is so ordinary. She
 had tasted the solitude worse than that
 of the unpeopled desert or the unpeo.
 pied ocean. In population of some S..
 100000 this city maiden of 12 years was
 without one single friend or protector
 Up to the age of she had lived in
 some precarious and miserable manner
 with her parents in a. dark and dirty
 court turning off from Oxford street
 When she was her father died, and shortly afterward the mother was taken i'll and had to go to the infirmary, be-
 tween which institution and the little hole rented in the dingy court she seems to have oscillated during the last five years, often maintained by the child rather than maintaining her. For Jessie Smith picked up a sixpence now and then, it appears, from jobs in the court minding babies running errands and the like, and had all the courage and rsouree of an Arab of the pave- ment.
 A month ago her mother, died and, deprived of such scant assistance as her poor hands had rendered. Jessie was at last conquered in her long fight with hunger, sickness and poverty. When har 1oil of 1 and drunk her watered milk there was no longer sixpences enough to pay for the weekly lodging; and dreadful as 1t must appear to the point of incredibil- ity, the landlord cast her forth into the gutter, and the neighbors of Gees court saw her cast forth without a hand to help her.
 Twelve years of age, she found her self as completely alone in London, as the thirsty traveller lost in Sahara or the sailor adrift without provisions on the waves. For two or three weeks she lived in the streets, as ownerless dogs live, eating refuse and sleeping in emp ty stables or upon doorsteps. The un~ reasonable weather was against her and added the misery of cold to her pinchng hunger.
 London children of this unhappy class never think until the last turn of the screw about invoking the aid of the police. They are, on the contrary, brought up to regard the copper as their natural enemy and we can make some estimate of the depth of despair reached by Jessie Smith when we learn Io Ioc fIa tn maid of the pavement, broken, beaten, crushed by calamities, gave up all and asked a policeman" Very kindly, he took Jessie into custody for the crime of being starved, ragged, friendTess and visible means of subsistence" ["
 Thus her pathetic story came out be- fore MT. Plowden. at Marylebone police court but accompanied by such copious floods of tears that it was necessary for the court missionary to hear her story in private and then to communicate it to the Bench. Then did little Jessie Smith find that copper" can be, as it were a messenger of mercy and a mag istrate as good as fairy mother. The only bit of blue that ever showed in the sky of her life broke now through it's dark clouds. Our report runs. MT Plowden said to the child, Don't be un happy any more. You have gone through q rough time. Things are going to mend for you now"
 As for the tale itself. in general aspects and features it is only too con- mon, too constantly recurring, For too many of the boys and girls of the class to which Jessie Smith belonged, London is, as it was to her, a waterless desert. D tractless. lonely ocean, a solitude in which five millions of living souls do not break the silence and the terror. The points in the story which are strange, if truly narrated, are, first, that a landlord should have turned the child adrift with such apparently inhu- man brutality; and, secondly, that the neighbors should have allowed this 12 year-old gutter maid to drift so sud denly out of sight of them all along the stream which flows towards shame or starvation.
 No doubt those who live upon the rent of these slum estates must, and will, collect their weekly money. and pity is d costly luxury, in which they do not often indulge. But Gees court, Oxford street, must have known a great deal about Jessie Smith and her ill-luck, her sufferings and her strug- gles, and Gees court must be very diff 'erent from other localities of the same kind in this prodigious metropolis if 1t did not hold one man or woman whose heart melted toward the child, and whose humanity could not find some little corner for the 12-year-old orphan better than a hard doorstep or a filthy