Let me sound the alarm note as loud as I can, for already evil has gone far. While we have been elaborating costly tramp wards, erecting baths and stoving apparatus, and frightening the genuine tramp away, common lodging-houses have been increasing on every side. The following is the testimony of the Rev. Arthur Dale, of Manchester, and it is not one whit exaggerated:--"The men who habitually live there are almost universally morally bad. Many are married, but have left their wives and families; nearly all are the victims of drink. A few, but very few, are honest. Some are idle, and profess their inability to get up early enough to go to work. Some will work for a day or two and then 'slack.' There are large numbers out of work simply for this cause. Fornication and gambling are both practised largely."[152] Yet in every large town these men are now counted by hundreds, sometimes by thousands, every night. Has not the disintegration of the home proceeded very far? For, by common experience, prosecutions for child maintenance and separation orders as between husband and wife are granted daily, and with terrible facility the marriage bond is practically annulled, and yet the individual is not freed. What is the consequence? The man removes to another town and lives in nominal celibacy. Vice and idleness may make him a _tramp_. He can no longer have a home; for if he takes a partner and rears children they have all the fatal taint of illegitimacy, they will not respect or obey him. The whole of our lower working class is thus becoming leavened with immorality. And what about the woman? The life and death of our nation depends on an awakening to the gravity of the menace that threatens the true home on every side. An unstable society has brought about fear. People fear to fall out of employment and be thrust down into the abyss, and hence the custom of _limitation of family_, with all its consequences, is spreading to the upper stratum of the working classes. I cannot recall any one of the many respectable young couples I have known married during the last sixteen years with a large family of living children. Fear has also _postponed marriage_, except in the improvident. Many spend the flower of their youth in gathering for a home. The improvident alone rush to marriage as boys and girls, and rear an unhealthy offspring, to whom they can never teach self-control.