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gyll, as regards the evils of overcrowding in the great cities, that Scotland in 1851 was as bad if not worse than England.

Lord Shaftesbury's remedial proposals did not err on the side of stringency. This act did not oblige anybody to do anything. It was simply a permissive measure giving power to local authorities to erect lodging-houses, the local authorities endowed with this power in London being the Vestries. The act remained a dead letter for about forty years, except in Ireland, till the first London County Council availed themselves of its provisions as modified by subsequent acts to build an excellent model lodging-house near the slums of Drury Lane, containing an agreeable reading and recreation room to which county councillors occasionally resort, sometimes with their womankind, and administer suitable entertainment.

Lord Shaftesbury's act was followed in 1855 by the Metropolis Management Act, which effected a very important new departure. Under this act the London Vestries were assigned greater powers, the mode of their election was altered and an attempt was made to treat London outside the city as an administrative unit by the formation of a central body exercising jurisdiction over the whole metropolis, composed partly of nominees of the government and partly of persons elected by the Vestries and known as the Metropolitan Board of Works.

In 1866 a public health act was passed giving local authorities power to fix the number of inhabitants to each house, to register and inspect lodging-houses, to have them cleansed and to make sanitary by-laws. As regards this last power it was a privilege which in many quarters was by no means received with favor; indeed in Ireland some twenty years later only three towns had availed themselves of this provision. The year 1866 was also remarkable for bringing Mr. Torrens to the front as a "housing" reformer. In that year he introduced one of the acts known by his name, which on the suggestion of Mr. Gladstone was referred to a select committee, and became law in 1868. This act dealt with the demolition and construction of single houses, or small groups of houses, and unlike Lord Shaftesbury's act, applied not only to populous places, but all over the country.

Torrens' Act, however, even as amended in 1879, was seldom put in force. In London the Vestries were entrusted with its administration, but the London vestryman is not, as a rule, keen

in matters of sanitary reform, and it must be admitted that the gloomy doubts which oppressed vestrymen as to the policy of enforcing the act were not altogether without justification. The principle on which the act proceeded was that of buying out slum landlords on extravagant terms. This was a costly process, and on that account objectionable. But there was another objection behind, of a much more serious character. It was argued with great force that to buy up slum property at a fancy price was to encourage the manufacture of slums by enterprising and unscrupulous landlords, who would hasten to invest the money received from the ratepayer for the privilege of demolishing one slum in the purchase of another property which, by suitable treatment, might become equally objectionable and yield a similar profit.

In 1875 the sanitary law was consolidated and amended cxcept as regards London, which was still left under the act of 1866, and Lord Cross (then Sir Richard) passed the first of a series of enactments relating to the housing question which bear his name. Lord Cross's acts differ from the acts passed by Mr. Torrens in that the former deal with large, and the latter with small, areas, and in Cross's acts the authority to put them in motion was the Metropolitan Board of Works and not the Vestries; but they both were subject to the same error of giving compensation on a far too liberal scale to slum landlords. Parliament was not satisfied, and in 1881 a select committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider the working of the housing

acts.

In the following year the labors of that committee resulted in the passing of yet another act-the Artisans' Dwellings Actreducing the scale of compensation to slum owners, and in 1883 the Local Government Board bestirred itself and issued an elaborate circular dealing with sanitation. It should be mentioned that several of the housing acts authorized loans of public money on more or less favorable terms for the construction of workmen's dwellings.

But all this activity in the Legislature and in government departments did not satisfy public opinion. The press took up the question. Mr. Chamberlain in the Fortnightly made a valuable suggestion that was doubtless read with interest by those who toil not neither do they spin." "The expense," he wrote, "of

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making the towns habitable for the toilers who dwell therein must be thrown on the land which their toil makes valuable, and that without any effort on the part of the owners."

Public opinion, already in a restless and excited condition, was roused to enthusiasm by the appearance of a pamphlet bearing an attractive title, "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London." Slumming was as fashionable a pastime as cycling is now, and not nearly as dangerous. Something, it was clear, had to be done, not because the evil was spreading, for competent observers were agreed that both overcrowding and bad sanitation were steadily on the decline, but because public opinion had outstripped the leisurely pace of the Legislature and the sanitary authorities. So Lord Salisbury moved for the appointment of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, and in March, 1884, Sir William Harcourt, as Home Secretary, nominated a very strong commission, of which the Prince of Wales was a working member.

This commission took a great deal of evidence as to the extent and nature of the evils to be remedied, especially in London, evidence which is worthy of attention not only as furnishing a strong case for further legislative effort, but as affording an authoritative basis of comparison between the London of 1851 and of 1884.

Bad as matters still were, the worst horrors depicted by Lord Shaftesbury had disappeared. We no longer hear of a hundred men sleeping in a room containing air space sufficient only for three. We no longer read of men, women, and children huddled together like herrings in a barrel, and children with the smallpox were not any longer condemned to take their chance and propagate their malady in these filthy and crowded stews. But still families of seven, eight, and nine persons, some of whom were adults, were found in occupation of small, dark, and damp rooms, and where grown-up sons and daughters slept in the same room, lodgers would sometimes be taken in. It was found that some houses, decent in front, had no washhouses, no backyards, and no back ventilation. In houses let out into many tenements the street door was always kept open to suit the convenience of the crowd of inmates, a circumstance abundantly taken advantage of by tramps with no habitation, who fill up the passages and staircases rather than pay fourpence for a bed at a common lodging-house,

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or doss-house as they call it. Such intruders esteem themselves in luck to get shelter for nothing, and are known as "'Appy Dossers."

The value attached by the poor, and even by those who are not in the depths of poverty, to decent surroundings in family life is a very variable quantity. Decent lodging is not by any means universally regarded as one of the prime necessaries of life. Occasionally it is relegated to quite a back seat.

An instance was given before the Commission of a family of seven persons-father, mother, two grown-up sons, and three grown-up daughters-all living in one room. With them this arrangement was a matter of choice, not necessity, for they earned between them about £7 a week-more than £350 a year-and even from a sium landlord they could no doubt have afforded to rent another room or two. Having screwed down the item of rent to an irreducible minimum, they determined to have a thoroughly good time, and this is how the witness describes their proceedings: "In the evening they would all go out to the music halls, and to the theatres. On Saturday afternoon they would take five tickets each for some omnibus or conveyance that was going into the country, and on Sunday they would go to Brighton and to other places." It is comforting to reflect that these Arcadian beings were such a united family, and always took their pleasure together as well as their naps. It is not stated whether they took in lodgers.

If the poor were not always duly impressed with the necessity of avoiding foul and overcrowded lodgings, it was equally certain that in many cases the London Vestries, and indeed other sanitary authorities throughout the kingdom, took their duties easily. It was by no means universally acknowledged that to perform the work of an inspector necessitated any expert training, common sense being, as one witness put it, quite sufficient; and we find that a man who had been "something in the jewelery trade" was considered competent to inspect drains and report upon dangerous structures. The Commission, moreover, noted with misgiving that house farmers preponderated on certain committees of certain vestries, and recommended that the administration of Lord Shaftesbury's act and of Torrens' acts should be transferred from the Vestries to the Metropolitan Board of Works-the then central authority for London. This transfer was duly effected by

the Legislature, and on the establishment in 1889 of the London County Council-that Frankenstein of the Conservative party which revealed in Conservative London an unsuspected vein of municipal radicalism-the representatives of the people presided over by Lord Rosebery took the housing question zealously in hand in all its branches.

Their efforts were immensely strengthened by the passing in 1891 of a Public Health Act for London, enabling them in default of the Vestries to execute themselves the necessary work of sanitation. Under the powers of that act and other recent legislation, particularly the Housing Act of 1890, they have cleared out and are now rebuilding a vast and unhealthy slum of 15 acres in the heart of the east end, and many other slums are being dealt with in like drastic fashion. They have built many blocks of workmen's dwellings, their model lodging house at 6d. a night is very popular, and having acquired from the government the site of Millbank prison, they are laying out part of it for workmen's dwellings.

It is disappointing to find that these operations have for the most part resulted in a considerable loss to the ratepayer. The clearing out of slums owing to the unsatisfactory state of the law, and the much more unsatisfactory state of the practice, as to compensation to owners of the property, cannot be otherwise than an expensive matter. Mr. Chamberlain complained that in Birmingham the cost of acquiring property running into millions was 70 per cent. above its market value. He considered it was the practice rather than the law that was at fault, and, indeed, it seemed impossible to persuade arbitrators not to give extravagant compensation. Lately, however, the principle of "betterment," so well known in the United States, has been sanctioned by the Legislature, and will do something to lessen the cost of doing away with slums and effecting improvements of every kind.

The Royal Commission gave some useful leads. They suggested that the slum landlord, instead of being bought out, should be kept up to his duty, that arbitrators should be prohibited from following their usual practice of assessing compensation on the increased value a property would derive from a proposed improvement, and that only such interests as an improvement necessarily interfered with need be bought up.

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