Part 15 (1/2)
Their first suggestion is that vestries and district boards should put in force existing by-laws, though who was to make them do it is not mentioned. Then they think it would be an added decency to the lives of the poor if there were more mortuaries near their homes to take the dead bodies from the already overcrowded rooms--as though the problem they were there to consider was not the housing of the quick, but the housing of the dead.
Building by-laws, sanitary inspection, and workmen's trains are a few of the Mother Partington Mop remedies that this great Commission had to offer to keep back the sea of troubles that overwhelmed the poor of our great cities in their struggle for decent existence.
One cannot blame the members of the Commission that so little was suggested. It was inevitable when one remembers that nothing at all is possible in the right direction without a great upheaval which is bound to re-act injuriously on some of the greatest vested interests in the country. A meeting of the great ones in whom the interests vest is not likely to bring about immediate reforms.
But at all events here in the pages of the printed evidence are the facts.
The horrors painted by D'Israeli, Kingsley, d.i.c.kens and George R. Sims are at least patiently collated and indexed for us, and now after thirty years we should do better not to expatiate on the little we have done for betterment, but to acknowledge how much we have left undone, and show our repentance in energetic deeds. No one can recognise more clearly than I do the value of such authoritative evidence of facts and details as are collected in the report, but the reading of them only makes one the more impatient at the method of government which can tolerate the continuance of such abuses.
In 1900, little or nothing having been done, it occurred to Lord Salisbury that it was time to have another Commission. But it was not until 1902 that a Select Committee of both Houses was appointed to consider, in Lord Salisbury's own words, how to get rid of ”what is really a scandal to our civilisation--I mean the sufferings which many of the working cla.s.ses have to undergo in order to obtain even the most moderate, I may say the most pitiable accommodation.”
The problem could not be better stated. The scandal was with us in 1885, it was with us in 1900, and it is with us to-day. At least if we are unwilling or incompetent to solve it let us have done with the constant consideration and further consideration of Royal and Select Commissions which only make the hearts of the poor sick with promises and hopes that can never be fulfilled in our own generation.
One cannot here set out in detail the various Housing Acts that have been pa.s.sed; there was one in 1900, which apparently led to more insanitary houses being closed than new cottages built. There was another in 1903, with further new provisions and modifications of former schemes, and lastly comes the Housing and Town Planning Act, which deals rigorously with owners of insanitary property. This Act industriously made use of may help to realise our hopes of the possibility of hygienic pleasances for the poor of future generations.
Here we have a short record of some fifty years of legislative effort--more or less honest--in which each party has sought to promote measures to help the poor who are oppressed, as Lord Salisbury said, by this ”scandal to our civilisation,” the want of decent housing. And yet how little has been achieved, how small the results, how disappointing to find the great men who talked in Parliament and sat on Commissions and discussed these matters with so much learning and ability pa.s.sing away and leaving this problem for us to tackle, and we on our part looking idly on and still wondering what can be done. If our schoolmasters had taught us how to make bricks and build with them instead of how to read books and write more of them, better results perhaps had been already achieved.
There are many acres of houses in England built prior to 1870 that exhibit all the slum traits that have been so eloquently described in literature, and many millions of our fellow citizens live in houses which fall below the minimum standard of sanitation where the decent separation of the s.e.xes is impossible and the general conditions of life are sunless and miserable. The amount of overcrowding in England and Wales is shown graphically enough in the census returns for 1911. Overcrowding from a census point of view means that more than two persons live in a room, counting the kitchen as a room, but not the scullery. ”Thus,” as the Editor of the Land Inquiry Report tells us, ”if a tenement or cottage consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen, the Census Authorities would only describe it as overcrowded if there were more than six persons living in it, no matter how small the rooms. The Census test of overcrowding is, in fact, quite inadequate to measure the full extent of the evil, and there is great need for the adoption of a more accurate one. Even adopting this standard, however, the Census Authorities find that one-tenth of the total urban population of England and Wales are overcrowded. This means that nearly 3,000,000 persons are overcrowded.”
No one who is constantly meeting the victims of this state of affairs, and discussing with them, as a County Court Judge has to do, their domestic affairs, can fail to be struck with the large amount of infantile mortality and disease, and the prevalence of tuberculosis and the general physical and moral weariness and debility, which may in a great measure be traced to the bad conditions in which the working cla.s.ses must perforce live because there is nothing better obtainable.
The price paid for such accommodation as there is, is a cruel tax on the working man. For the meanest shelter he has to pay anything up to twenty per cent. of his weekly income. Imagine a man with a thousand a year spending two hundred a year in rent alone. How eloquent would the Official Receiver be did bankruptcy supervene, as it probably would, and what homilies he would preach on the rash and extravagant folly of the bankrupt in spending so large a proportion of his income on a house. And yet this extravagance is compulsory to a working man, who has to pay out of his wages for a mere roof over his head money that is badly needed for the food and clothing of himself and his family.
I have dwelt on this subject at some length because in most of the chapters of this book my complaint has been that the laws are insufficient to help the poor, because they have in past days been enacted by the rich, and are still being administered by the rich, without knowledge of, and sympathy for, the best interests of the poor. Here the problem is entirely different. Everyone must admit the energy and good faith of all cla.s.ses and parties and officials, within the rules of the party game, in their endeavour to cope with a condition of things which is an admitted national disgrace, and a scandal to civilisation. The melancholy conclusion, however, stares one in the face. The result of interminable inquiries and committee meetings and palaver is plain unmistakable failure. The fringe of the subject has scarcely been reached, and the state of affairs which the man of letters portrayed to the shame of our grandfathers is likely enough, it would seem, to be ”copy” for our grandchildren and their grandchildren to journalise with world without end Amen!
And although it would be impertinent in me to pretend to have a remedy for these evils where all the great ones have failed to bring about reform, yet I cannot help thinking that the reason of the failure is the reason of much of our legislative failure--the dread of vested interests and the permissive character of the statutes pa.s.sed. What is the good of asking a town council of builders and landowners and estate agents to put in force laws that will, or at least are expected to, have the effect of diminis.h.i.+ng their incomes? Should I, or would you, enforce an Act of Parliament with any joyful energy when we knew that the more thoroughly we did it the more we should be out of pocket? It is asking too much of human nature.
There has been a clear failure in the smaller local governing bodies in putting in force even such legislation as exists for the betterment of the district. The Rivers Pollution Acts are a standing instance of the neglect of duty by local councils. For years nothing was done to put the Acts in force, because the smaller polluters were the mill owners, who were members of the local council, and the biggest polluter of all was the council itself pouring crude sewage into the river to relieve the rates.
Parliament lacked a sense of humour when it expected mill owners and sewage boards to prosecute themselves for river pollution.
Good work in housing will never, I think, be really effectively done until it is left to the initiative of a medical officer of health or a sanitary engineer, with judicial power to order things to be done and force behind him to have them done. The idea that a medical officer of health should be a servant of the casual butchers and bakers of the Town Council is, on the face of it, an absurd one. He should be as permanent and independent as are the stipendiary, the judge, or the coroner, for he requires even more than common fearlessness to deal roundly with the jerry builders and slum owners who are his aldermen and councillors, and who at present sit on a committee of appeal from his decisions.
As long as these matters are left solely to local bodies the real burden of financial consideration, the lack of personal knowledge of hygiene and sanitation among the members themselves, and the shrinking from enforcing legal hards.h.i.+ps on the poor owners of bad property, will alone prevent effective reform. To these natural and honest forces must also be added the weight of vested interests, which deliberately obtain power on local bodies for the purpose of preventing housing reform being put into thorough operation.
Never was there a greater and louder demand by the people for a fair share of the land they live in. The countryman wants his plot and his cottage, and the town dweller a decent house at a reasonable rent. This is the ”condition of England question” to-day as it was eighty years ago. Never were there more earnest and sincere people discussing what is to be done and how it is possible to transform slums into decent dwellings by Act of Parliament. We have a willing legislature, a desire to make laws for the benefit of the poor, and after many efforts the result has to be written down as failure and stagnation. It would almost seem as though voluntary effort in this affair had p.r.o.nounced itself impossible, and it remains undealt with until those who are the real sufferers by the system feel strong enough to put it right.
Carlyle in an eloquent pa.s.sage cries out in his pa.s.sionate way: ”Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical. Whose land _was_ this of Britain? G.o.d's who made it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of G.o.d's creatures had a right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes, they; till one with a better right showed himself. The Celt, 'aboriginal savage of Europe,' as a snarling antiquary names him arrived, pretending to have a better right, and did accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that piece of G.o.d's land; namely, a better might to turn it to use--a might to settle himself there and try what use he could turn it to. The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession and tilled.”
Interpreting this pa.s.sage as one written in the true frenzy of prophecy, two things seem to me to take clear shape in the future outlook of the housing question. In the first place, it would seem that it will have to be settled by a Celt, and in the second place it will not be achieved ”without pain to the bisons.”
One would have thought that a better plan would be a small business parliamentary committee of all interests with power to enforce their decrees against owners and corporate bodies. Something permanent is necessary, akin to the Imperial Defence Committee, which knows no party politics. Are we not here in the face of a real danger to the nation?
Already endeavours have been made to take this matter out of the common rut of party politics, but these efforts have not been altogether successful, and if the matter is not settled soon there would seem nothing for it but a forcible solution and a merry set-to between the Celt and the bison, in which we may expect the Celt will get the better of the bison but we cannot be sure that the poor will get all they need even from the Celt.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES
1. THE ALEHOUSE.