This chapter concerns middle-class attitudes towards the urban poor. It considers whether the state of sections of the working classes was felt indicative of an inexorable threat that industrialized modernity posed to the collective health of the nation. It will argue that ulterior concerns, rooted primarily in debates about economic policy and the role of the state in public life, conspired to prevent worries about racial decline from becoming a prominent feature of English cultural life. Rather than a manifestation of a general malaise, forceful declarations about racial decline were instead a contingent outcome of certain national and local struggles, whereby the rhetoric of racial decline could be harnessed in a transitory fashion as a weapon for particular political purposes.