The Leprosy of the Slums
" The plain truth is that we are living in a terribly over-crowded country. The population of England, apart from that in Wales and Scotland, is more than 700 to the square mile. This means that we are four times as crowded as India, and nearly three times as congested as China. We are twice as crowded as Germany or Italy, and nearly four times as crowded as France."
N these words Mr. Townroe touches the root of the problem. Our slums are due to the congestion consequent on rapid industrialization. But not for a moment do we suggest that there is no way out of our difficulties, or that our population is necessarily greater than we can support. We can maintain a forty-million population in decency, as long as we keep our trade. In order to do so, however, our town-planning and housing regulations must, for many years to come, be one of our chief national concerns.
Of late there have been many signs in many quarters, of active interest and rightful indignation concerning those breeding-grounds of depravity and disease that have so often been described in the Spectator. Mr. Townroe is to be congratulated on his vigorous and vivid survey of the whole question. We described last week the conditions under which the human sardines of Shoreditch are packed. Mr. Townroe shows us why this has happened and why 3,000,000 of us in England are still so shamefully housed. Every urban area in England contains similar sections of disgusting overcrowding and promiscuity. Nor is it only our cities that need sun- light and sanity. Mr. Townroe describes a cottage where six children and their two parents sleep in one bedroom, while in the other two adolescent boys and two girls of eleven and nine sleep together : in the living room half a pig is hung, there being no other place to store it. Clergymen have written to him giVing details of the appalling conditions that exist in their parishes, but they say that it is impossible to make any forward move owing to the opposition of local vested interests. " No Minister of Health," says Mr. Townroe, " can hope 'The Slum Problem. By B. S. Townroe. (Longmans. Os.) to succeed in his war on the slums without the whole- hearted co-operation of local authorities." We agree, and would add as a corollary that few Local Authorities will take action until stirred thereto by publicity.
We must look without flinching at the human side of the problem, and Mr. Townroe does well to point out that the slum dweller is often a distinct type of home sapiens—but not a type confined either to cities or to the poor. There are parasites in all classes. We all know the rich man or woman with the slum mind, who in different circumstances would degenerate into " poor white trash," or to the verminous, destructive tenant. Nurses, governesses, tutors, secretaries, and maids keep such people clean and tidy when their services can be purchased. But the feckless poor have no one to help them. They make a part of the slums and drag the rest of the district down with them ; they are centres of infection ; and they breed early and often, and raise others of their kind, creating a state of affairs which only wise manage- ment can alleviate. Fortunately the principles of such management have been tried and proved : they promise 'the best hope for the ultimate extinction of slumdom.
We. refer, of course, to the Octavia Hill system of management. Miss Hill's work was based on love instead of pecuniary profit. She substituted a good landlord for a bad one. In place of a desire to exploit the tenant, she provided a rent collector whose object was to give sym- pathy and service. That .was the beginning of a system that is_ now. practised all over the world. There is no desert of stone and cement that the alchemy of love cannot transmute into a garden.
Let us consider, however, some of . the difficulties. To discuss them all would be impossible and unprofitable, for we should never come to grips with the problem. But some we must glance at. First of all, the slum. dwellers themselves sometimes .object to attempts to ameliorate their conditions. " One old man of eighty- two," says Mr. Townroe, " spoke warmly of his home as being one of the snuggest and quietest spots in London and he was much amused at the idea of any social reformer regarding it as unhealthy. He said that he had lived there for more than fifty years and had had no illness." Saving people from themselves is often a thankless process, and in any clearance of bad districts there are bound to be cases of hardship and confusion. Then there is the great and sometimes unavoidable delay which occurs before the authorities and interests involved in any scheme of slum clearance give their approval. For more than two years now, for instance, the Chelsea Housing Improvement Society have been attempting to clear the World's End area, but it remains. Finally, there is the difficult question of compensation. At present compensation is only allowed for site value and Local Authorities are naturally loath to inflict the hardship on individual owners of property which demolition of such property as business premises entails if the owner receives nothing for his goodwill and for the destruction of his home beyond the value of the ground (already depre- ciated owing to its being in a slum area) on which his shop stands. How this thorny question can be adjusted we cannot now discuss, but some adjustment is most certainly possible. Human nature makes slums. That is very true—as true as the fact that human nature can remedy the muddles it has made.
We wish that Mr. Townroe's book could be read in every home in England, for his survey is eminently sane and fair. We have only one word of criticism. In his desire to be unsensational Mr. Townroe occasionally assumes that there exists more interest in housing in England than the facts warrant. In his concluding paragraphs, for instance, he says that Local Authorities are certainly alive to the immensity of the slum evil. We do not think they are, as a whole. We believe that an insistent and increasing pressure of public opinion will be necessary to keep the representatives of the rate- payers up to the mark. It is so easy to let things slide, so difficult to overcome the opposition of vested interests which any measure of reform necessarily arouses.
We are as opposed as Mr. Townroe to emotional appeals not based on facts and not capable of translation into bricks and mortar. But without emotion there can be no drive in any movement. Did our dead in France fight for a philosophic abstraction ? Shall our living be led out of the morass of poverty by statistics and Acts of Parliament ? We must visualize and imagine the plight of our brothers and sisters, feel it in our bones as well as register it in our minds. What does it mean to the average man and woman that the density of our population is seven hundred to the square mile ? But when we say that babies are being born to mothers in England in rooms where three or four children must also sleep, we get a glimmer of the misery and muddle so close to us all.
These lines are written with a deep sense of their inadequacy to deal with a great problem in a little space. But once we are clear that the slums must go, the puzzle of ways and means will solve itself, under Providence. Nothing will be put right until we insist on it collectively and vehemently. The insisting may be an empensive process. It may—it should—entail a national stock- taking such as we have often advocated, so that replanning in one area will not lead to congestion in another and so 'that economical development. may take place all round. If every reader of these lines will first visit a slum for Nimself, and then read- The Slum Problem, we warrant that he or she will join the growing army of those of us who believe that the miracle of Naaman can be rrepeated,. and the fair body of England cleansed from this scourge.
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