"If this little chap," said he, "was as clean as I could wash him and as well dressed as you could dress him, what difference would there be between him and a little prince?"
After the party had finished their round of inspection somebody suggested tea.
"It's no use looking for swell tea shops in Poplar," said Crooks. "But if you care to come with me, my wife will just be getting tea ready for the children coming home from school, and no doubt we can find a corner for you at the same table."
And straightway he led them to Northumberland Street and into his own house without warning, where they shared with the children at the deal table in the kitchen.
Sometimes for whole weeks together in the black days of distress he could never finish his breakfast without being called to the door to advise an out-of-work man or some sorrow-laden woman, or to deal with some case of starvation that brooked no delay.
Of course he often defied the laws of political economy. That is sometimes the only way to prevent people dying from want. A learned professor of political economy, whose name I am not at liberty to mention, was converted to some part at least of Crooks's view in a single morning. The Professor called on him during a winter of hard times, and Crooks showed him how some of his neighbours were living.
"Hunger we can sometimes stand, 'cos we gets used to it," they heard from one woman, surrounded in her bare tenement by lean and shivering babies; "but to be frozen with cold on the top of the hunger—that's the thing that makes yer squirm, guv'nor—ain't it, Mr. Crooks?"
Then the Labour man led the Professor to a slum court. On the muddy ground in the far corner a woman sat weeping.
"She ain't been living here long, Mr. Crooks," volunteered another woman from her doorstep. "Her husband's no work, and this morning she were a-sending her four children to school without a bite, so I calls 'em in here, and shared out wot we was having for breakfast."