LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
THE SLUM AND THE EMERGENCY HOUSE
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Your battle cry will put heart of hope into every one of us ! You exaggerate nothing. There is an emergency. Beneath and beyond all else, it is a food emergency. And you sound the victorious note. " Get out, get out, ye city populations ; out into the open at once, under a hard-shelled tent, and donot wait in Sodom !" In the words of a hackneyed advertisement, your campaign " touches the spot." Cheap, ,simple, sanitary houses, rapped together like a tent and struck down again, in minimum time—nothing, for our whole ;social economy, is more cardinal than that.
And 'while yoa•are getting the houses built (or demonstrating that they are buildable) will not someone else come forward and be thinking out where to put them ? If it were actual war,
one would think at once of public parks, open spaces, vacant plots, anything, anywhere, to have the crowded hosts of our working populations strung out into open order so that the bombs of the enemy would do less damage among them. Of course, it is not war. Nor, we trust, is war on the farthest visible horizon, at present. But even if war could never come again ; still, everything is calling to us—health, morality, home life, everything—to spread the people out ; to spread them out, and yet further spread them out ; to the point not only of feeling the breezes blow, but of gathering some of their own food at a pinch. And I will make a suggestion. •
not someone to whom it would be easy be inspired to ransack the town-planning Acts, to see just what land-buying powers a municipal corporation has got, if it wanted to exercise them to the very full, in order to string its people out along the country roads, in houses fairly close together but with deep backs--- cheap Spectator houses with strips of land behind—on which every inhabitant could at a pinch get a picking ; and have tram lines to run them out and in to their city work. If he could ransack all the relevant land legislation for existing powers, and put the results in plain language, he would bring off a profound stroke in as great a cause as even the Spectator has ever taken up, in its long and honourable history. I have a shrewd suspicion that their powers arc really greater than most corporations know.—I am, Sir, &c., J. W. Scorn.
University College, Cardiff.
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