THE SLUM AND l'HE EMERGENCY HOUSE
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The claims of others to your space on this subject may well be greater than mine. My excuse for coming in again 'must simply be the intensity of the hope which your slum proposals might be made to rouse in all who feel the weight of the social problem. I almost seem to see history turning upon them ; and, in especial, upon how you determine a certain very small point in the scheme, which you have left indeter- minate. Your call to the Ministry of Health, in the matter of the clearing of the slums, is that they should move the people into temporary shelters, rigged up somewhere quickly, until the clearance is made. You say "temporary shelters," hard-shelled tents " ; just something to keep the wind off, so to speak, until the job be done. But you seem also pri- vately to hope that some of these emergency houses will turn out no such bad houses after all ; houses perhaps with thirty, forty; fifty years of a lifetime in them. Lord Weir's "hard- shelled tent," apparently, is actually going to be a durable "emergency house" of that kind. And you hope a few more may appear at the exhibition.
Why not, then, Sir—for very much seems to me to turn on the point—aim at the bigger thing explicitly from the first ; at, say, a £350 house, to be assembled in a fortnight, having fifty years of a lifetime ; in other words, a house that could keep the slum-dweller once it had got him, and perhaps keep him in some of his food, too ? Let me say at once that what I would now suggest has little or nothing to do with Ilomecrofting. That is a definite science with great new possibilities ; how great can never be known till direct experi- mentation is done upon it. I am thinking just now only of this crowd of refugees from the condemned slum areas who have to be taken out of the wind and the cold. And I say, with you, get the emergency houses ready for them first ; but also I should let it just be understood that they are to be good ones, I should let the people see them getting ready, and let them hope to stay permanently in them.
For surely the thing can be done. Take a growing family living in an 8s. a week slum home, and insert them into a Lord Weir steel cottage, with enough ground at the back of it to yield them another 4s. a week. Even if it is a quarter of an acre they have, that 12s. a week in fifty years (f 1,560) will repay the Ministry of Health the whole capital and a respectable rate of interest. And you are only asking the slum dweller to take from one quarter of an acre at his door what the ordinary man can get out of a 10-rod plot which he has to travel to. With the buying powers over land which Mr. Jarratt pointed out in your issue of December 27th, combined with mass production of houses, such a home-on-an-allotment, together with a motor-bus service, is clearly within sight.
Now I know, I think, the danger which lies in accumulating suggestions. I know well the importance in all this matter of your concentrating on just one single, limited, definite thing if you want to get it done. Will you incline to shut out from your plan even this suggestion of such land-cultivating compli- cations, for fear of overloading the boat ? But it is just because your boat is such a very good one that I urge them, And this brings me to what I want most of all—which is, to see you load on the whole cargo, and persuade one or two other strong oarsmen like yourself to come with you into the boat and take it straight to port. In plain words, it is surely no Utopian dream to think that you might get a few others of the powerful leading publicists of England with you aboard this ship—this one, or else another like unto it, which you all together might build ? For here you are hard up against what every publicist in England is interested in. Surely there is not a publicist in England who cannot see looming up behind this" menace of the slums" which makes your " emergency " ▪ that other "menace of famine" which makes the emergency we are all in, and which only missed us by a hair's breadth when the late U-boats beset our shores. Let us confront this. What finer, greater programme could occur to the masters of our Press—could it but spontaneously occur to several of them at once—than this : gradually to entrench the whole people against famine, by a policy of housing and educating ?
We need for this a new kind of suburb ; and your emer- gency houses, -if they are fifty-year houses, are already the beginning of it. We want areas of pretty, mass-produced
emergency houses, each with its + to acre or acre behind it' paid for as above ; on which ground, at a pinch, a family could survive a blockade. We should build them and go on building them, till in every industrial city the main mass of the industrial populations are got into this position of safety ; a position notice, not of safety only, but of comfort and happi- ness and beauty, from the moment the schools in these areas begin to train the elder children expressly for life in a garden home. And let us not forget such education is precisely the richest in all the educational values. We shall entrench against famine, then. No single thing, done nationally, would automatically add so many other things unto us. To do it nationally means getting the national mind upon it. And a united pull by half-a-dozen real leaders of national opinion could do that. It would catch like prairie fire. Just think to the hearts of how many people a united effort to spread the populations on a method which would pay for itself would come home. Sunlight and vegetable food ! All the smoke-abatement workers would welcome it, all the fighters of tuberculosis, all the medical advocates of right feeding, all lovers of home life ; the military defenders of the country would see cardinal value in it ; beyond these, how many education-reformers would bless the education that was in it ; and more important than all, think of its welcome by that whole tide-way of opinion which really believes in Kropotkin, in Britain for the British, and in freeing man from wages and offering him room for his creative instincts. I say, it would cateh like prairie fire.
And, Sir, you actually commence all this with your slum policy, if you aim to permanently spread your slum-dwellers. Of course, you will not start a conflagration in the green tree. Poor and the very poorest of material to grace an allotment- home is the slum-dweller. But that he is hopeless I for one shall never believe till I have seen the power of Hope really tried on him. Let's count the factors before we believe that nothing can be done, even in the green tree. Just imagine the inspiration of moving out of that slum hovel with wife and children into a place where there is a quarter of an acre for them to disport themselves over. That tide of new feeling in the breast only needs be utilized with some psychological insight. And nothing is easier. Approach this whole slum- clearing business in a human way. Circularize the whole population of the condemned area the moment the verdict has been given. Raise their hopes in the new life that awaits them. Let them see their new little town abuilding. Brighten their Sundays with little pilgrimages out to it. And while mass-producing houses for them, do but mass-produce a few extra ones. Reserve these for a small smattering of the practised plot-holders of the town, who would like a house on their plot, and don't mind about the neighbours. You would be sure then that some would do well ; and the others would all at least see what to do. Evangelize them to the new life. Let everything be ready for them in the new place before the demolition starts—even to the ploughing-up of the ground, and the provision of a few simple tools. And let them all trek out with their baggage and their bundles on one day. It will take a poet to paint that day. Nay, no poet will ever paint what is in the hearts of some of them. Battered, broken earthenware ! We are not foolish enough to think we can save them all. But we can save some—who shall say other- wise ! And the point is, that if we can save these, we can save England. We have hit the principle.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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