ARTISANS' AND LABOURERS' DWELLINGS ACT.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TDB "SPECTATOR.") Sin,—With the drift of your note on this Act I can quite concur ; it is often made the text of any amount of insincere sentimentality. But I heard Sir Charles Mike's speech to which you refer, and I think you must have been misled by an inaccurate report. He said,—" I wish it to be clearly understood that I do not attack the Act, and that I do not attack Mr. Cross for having passed it." Here, in Chelsea, we have thrashed out that measure, and have come to the conclusion that it is a good Act for improving towns, but that its title is a bit of sham Socialism, eminently characteristic of the present Government. It would be as reasonable to call any Railway Bill by the same title, for the Act does what railway companies are made to do in like cases, no more, no leas, —i.e., it provides that when under it " rookeries " are pulled down, sufficient space shall be set apart on which independent persons may build new houses for the evicted people ; not that the evicters shall build them, still less that they shall build them ready to receive the evicted people. What are we to think, then, of the state- ment of the Colonial Secretary that this Act gives to the working- men of England "homes which they may be proud to call their own?" As Sir Charles Dilke has said on a former occasion, if it were an Act for providing artisans and labourers with dwellings at the cost of other classes, it would be a most mischievous measure. Liberals have been somewhat remiss in not exposing the hollowness of the pretensions made by Conservatives in their new pseudo-Socialist role, and still more in not pointing out the danger lest the unthinking crowd should take them at their word, and clamour that the sham should be changed into a reality.
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