THE OVERCROWDING OF LONDON.*
Tins is a volume that everybody should read, and not read only, but keep at hand for reference. In a series of papers, which first appeared in the Daily News, Mr. Haw sets forth the hideous array of facts which make up the awful problem of the housing of the working classes in London, It used to be a safe assumption that only the destitute, only the unemployed, were houseless in our great cities. But at the present day in London a man may be able and willing to pay a pound a week for house-room for his family, and yet, because house-room is not forthcoming, be obliged to lodge, if not himself, his wife and children in the workhouse. The Public Health Act prescribes 400 cubic feet of space for one adult, or two children under twelve, to live and sleep in; or, where there is a living room in addition to the sleeping room, it allows as little as 300 cubic feet for the sleeping room. And it lays down certain rules as to the ages of children and the relations of adults sharing rooms. " Overcrowding " means contravening these regulations; and Mr. Haw's book shows us that one-fifth of the population of London, that is to say, about nine hundred thousand people, are systematically breaking the law. He shows us, also, how private individuals may set the law in action to punish the offenders by fine or eviction. But what he cannot show at present is where the evicted tenant is to go in order to escape the necessity of offending again. People overcrowd because they cannot get rooms, not because they are not willing to pay for them. The last Census returned three thousand Londoners as living eight or more in one room, over nine thousand as living seven and more in a room, and nearly twenty-six thousand as living six and more in a room. Since then the population of the capital has increased by three hundred thousand people. There are houses in London where rooms are let on the Box-and-Cox principle, tenants occupying in rotation for eight hours each. Sometimes a young woman will occupy the room by day, which is let to a young man by night. People sleep uncler beds as well as in them, and -pay rent for doing so. Evicted families live in sheds until they drift into the workhouse. The horrors of this state of things need no exaggeration and no sensational working up. The bare facts speak for themselves. Mr. Haw disclaims all pretensions to the part of a panacea-monger. Nevertheless, his concluding chapter states very usefully a number of ways in which individuals may work to bring about a reform. Among the measures to be striven after, the moat important are : the removal of manufactories from London into the country ; the abolition of compensation to land- lords for house property condemned to be demolished as unfit for habitation ; the extension over a longer period of years of repayments on building loans ; the building of cheaper tenements ; the checking of the stream of labour immigration from the country to the capital. When all has been said that can be said, and all has been done that can be done towards removing or lessening this horror of overcrowding in London, it will almost certainly be found that a very large part of the evil is not to be mended either by law or by philanthropy. " Gryll will be Gryll " and have his hoggish den as well as his "hoggish mind," in the slums of London not less than in Acrasia's bower of evil bliss. But, as Mr. Haw is careful to point out, the majority of the overcrowded people are "good- living people." Overcrowding tends to produce, and does most lamentably promote and increase, immorality and drunkenness, and all the degradations of body and mind that follow upon childhood and youth spent in circumstances that make the common decencies of home-life impossible. Hat, to the -credit of human nature, it is shown that many heroically resist the influences about them, and the whole of this "overcrowded fifth" of the population is not actually living at the moral level to which the weaker characters are inevitably degraded. This makes the condition of things at once more pathetic and less hopeless. And it 0- No .Roorn to Live: the Plaint of Overcrowded London. By George Haw. WIPA ligrodiastion by an 'ffsiter Beim*. :London:, Wells Gardner, Barton, and
justifies any degree of indignation against the slum-lord and the house-jobber who live by the present system. House- jobbers who say they do not care to what purposes their tenants put their rooms or their houses, so that they pay a high rent for them, deserve no mercy. And certainly land- lords who allow their property to get into a condition unfit for human habitation deserve no compensation when their houses are pulled down ; and yet compensation has been, and still may be, given to them :—
"It cost over a quarter of a million to remove the fifteen acres of squalid slunidom on the Boundary Street area. Here nearly: two-thirds of all the children born died in infancy. The general death-rate was nearly two and a half times greater than it was for the rest of London. People were living in foul cellars, rotten rooms, and in passages, courts, and streets reeking with filth and crime. Yet the owners who were responsible for allowing all this foulness to grow up and continue were compensated to the extent of a quarter of a million."
'Upon which Mr. Haw very pertinently remarks :—
" We don't compensate the dealers in bad meat or in adulter- ated food, we fine them. Why, then, should the dealers in bad and adulterated dwelling-houses get compensation? The seller of adulterated milk is quickly hauled before the magistrate, beoatuie adulterated milk endangers the health of adults and poisons little children. Yet adulterated houses are doing exactly the same thing."
A very gruesome chapter is that on the "horribly housed." But in connection with this part of his subject Mr. Haw makes a curious point by showing bow it is not in the "slums," but often in the respectable-seeming parts of London that the most terrible cases are dis- covered of solitary tenants rotting to death in dirt and vermin. The slums are neighbourly, though rough and over- crowded, and if their inhabitants "do for one another" some- times by violence, they "do for one another" also constantly in kindness. This state of things calls for a vigorous system of house-to-house inspection. Other aspects of the matter are treated in the following extract :— " It is calculated that this growth and overcrowding of London puts an additional 1;1,500,000 into the pockets of the landlords every year, although they do absolutely nothing for it If the landlord sells any portion of vacant land he may have, it is not until the people have made it valuable by coming to work or to live in the neighbourhood. He keeps a tight hold on his land until it ripens, no matter how sorely the people may be crying out for houses. He only pays rates on the agricultural value, such value being, say, £2 per acre, while the real market value of the land may be 21,000 or more per acre. But he waits until the value becomes 22,000 before selling. All over London this kind of thing is practised, and land that might accommodate thousands of houses is kept out of the market ripening for the landlord's gain, while the people are at their wits' end for want of room to live."
But most practical, and therefore most important, of all the points in the programme of reform, is insistence upon the building of new houses before the pulling down of old ones, however bad.
But, in truth, the whole housing problem is one of extreme difficulty. The cheaper you make the houses, and the better the accommodation given, the more you increase the rush to London, which is the cause of the trouble. Of course slums must not be kept up as deterrents, but we wish working men who think of going to London had so high a standard of com- fort that they would refuse work, though never so highly paid, unless they could be sure of a comfortable home. That would in the end do a good deal to cure matters. All other proposals are but palliatives.
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