NEWS OF THE WEEK.
REALLY we English are the most abjectly incompetent people in the world I Amidst the terrible distress in the East End there are a score or two score charitable agencies at work, each effecting about a third of the good they would effect if combined in a scien- tific organization. They all know that, but they will not combine, not even one clergyman with another, or one soup-kitchen with another, and if combination were forced on them they would become listless and weary. They are running, too, a very serious risk of pauperizing the population, who when in work earn great wages, and ought to save like French peasants or Highland quarry- men. More, we are convinced, could be done than is done by opening accessible banks, and more still by setting up a charitable Mont de Piete, a huge pawnbroker's shop lending money to the full value of the goods pledged.
