Ma. WILLIAM Bor.rrno published the greater number of the short
essays of which this little pamphlet is composed in the Outlook; but now in pamphlet form he has added a good deal of opinion to his valuable facts. He draws a terrible picture of the six hundred thousand over-crowded people who exist in Glasgow—a people needing, on the official local municipal estimate, fifty-seven thousand houses before they are housed even according to the comparatively low Scottish standard. Mr. Bolitho's picture is terrible, but he does not exaggerate. When you first walk through the streets of Glasgow you may think that he does : but if you go behind the streets into the back courts, use your imagi- nation, and consi...er that the "sick persons and young children" of the Litany live under the conditions that you see, then you will realize that the Glasgow dilemma and the Glasgow-tragedy are not-less great than he represents them. Conservatives will be very glad that these articles first ap- peared in a Unionist organ. The party has too long turned its eyes away from the contemplation of such things : and if Unionists do not heed, what wonder that in the great centres of population it is to Labour men turn. Those who know the industrial areas of England—large stretches of country in Lancashire and Yorkshire and South Wales—will realize that in a sense Glasgow's is not the greatest, though it is the most spectacular, civic tragedy of our days. There are districts where the foetid and decaying conditions of Glas- gow (on which Mr. Bolitho is so rightly eloquent) exist in patches that altogether make up an even worse aggregate than that of Glasgow.
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