THE COTTAGE PROBLEM.
WE do not understand at all why the Daily News' Commissioner to the villages is so angry with land- lords whose cottages are bad, and clergymen who will not quarrel with the squires on that account. That was sense when Charles Kingley wrote " The merry brown hares came leaping," because the central idea of " Yeast " is that feudalism should continue, but should become a closer and more kindly relation ; but it is nonsense in the mouth of the Daily News' reporter, who wants the tillers of the soil to become prosperous and independent workmen. He ought to see that in scolding the squires for their indifference, he is preaching to the new voters a gospel of dependence. It is the kindness, not the unkindness of the squires, which is answerable for some of the most serious evils of village life, and especially for the most serious one of all, the wretched condition of a section, often a large section, of the villagers' houses. Partly from tradition, but partly from sheer kindness, the landlords still offer to the labourers, either directly or through the farmers, perquisites in aid of wages, and especially the grand perquisite, a cheap home. Away from the neighbourhood of great towns, and some Northern districts, the regular rate for a cottage is still a shilling a week ; and as it ought, if interest is to be paid on capital, to be 4s. at least, the difference is always quoted as an addition to wages. The man, it is said, has only twelve shillings a week in silver, but he has other privileges, a cheap cottage, a cheap garden, cheap coal, cheap firing, and sometimes cheap milk, which bring his "advan- tages." when harvest-money is reckoned in, up to 18s. a week. To have the things he must otherwise buy, is, it is said, equivalent to having wages. It is not equivalent, and the sourness of the labourer when his advantages are pointed out to him is based upon a sound economic instinct. The perquisites, besides being charities, and therefore fatal to independence, cannot be saved. Our people, trained as they have been for centuries under a Poor-Law which, with all its merits—and we en- tirely acknowledge them—kills out foresight, have not the thrift of the French, German, or Italian peasantry ; but a large proportion of them would let their wives save, if only they had the silver to put away. You cannot save bits of a cottage or lumps of cheap coal, and the small wage received in specie is all wanted for peremptory expenses, and to pay the prices which trades- men who have to wait for the harvest-money—that is, to give nearly a year's credit—must charge for their goods. This fact is of itself sufficient answer to the easy chatter about "perquisites," which in bad villages are nothing better than the " truck " which in factory payments we have forbidden by law ; but as regards the cottages, the evil is much more far-extending. It is bad enough that the voter should have a nearly free house from the man who will ask for his vote, and so be driven under the ballot into systematic lying; but the cheap cottage makes the good cottage nearly impossible. A Duke of Bedford may waste his means and ease his conscience by repairing all cottages over a vast estate, but the smaller landlord cannot do it, and simply hates the "interfering folk" or " grumbling " labourers who worry him about the matter. He has to live by his trade, like the rest, and does not get for his capital 31 per cent. in actual sovereigns. If he is to keep on perpetually building and repairing, and at the same time abstain from evictions when men are discharged, he will not get 21 per cent. At the same time, he, with his low rents, kills competition. Only the most rascally and griping of speculators will touch cottage property under those circumstances, and they make their profit either by leaving everything undone which ought to be done, or by encouraging that system of "lodgers "which village doctors and clergy alike declare to be as fatal to civilisation, not to say morals, as to sanitation. If the landlord would charge a fitting rent—namely, 5 per cent, on outlay—the speculator in little houses would com- pete with him, and the villagers would be provided ; but fitting rent means interest at 5 per cent. on £200, or 4s. a week as the normal charge. With the present silver wages, this cannot be paid, and so the landlord has a few cottages for which everybody competes, and which are sometimes waited for for years ; the farmers have a few more, often exceedingly bad ; and there are a few " free " cottages, owned usually by some half-bankrupt little builder who has "taken up" a slice of quagmire, and which the local doctor well knows to be nothing but fever-traps. Some of these places, in some of the finest districts of England, are absolutely shocking, rows of brick huts without space or ventilation, or sanitary conveniences, or water which a respectable animal would drink. There is, in fact, no competition, and the cottages are as bad as under the same system the loaves or the bacon would become.
There are, moreover, two other causes which operate against the supply of cottages, which have never, that we know of, been frankly discussed. One is the preposterous dislike to wooden cottages which, for some unknown reason, has become in country districts an incurable prejudice. An excellent and roomy wooden cottage, weather-tight and cold- tight, a cottage which would delight a Scandinavian peasant, or a Swiss of the colder Cantons, can be put up for £100 or less, there being firms in London which are ready to sell them at that rate by the score. They are used all over North America, and there is, in fact, no objection to them what- ever, except a certain increase in the general danger from fire, an increase much more apparent than real, for old cottages burn like touchwood. A fair rent for that ex- penditure would be 2s. 6d. a week, or 5 per cent., with a reserve of 11 per cent, to pay off the original cost and make the cottage freehold ; and that rent could be paid. The proprietors, however, look askance at the wooden buildings, as wanting in picturesqueness ; the little builders denounce them steadily, as unhealthy ; and the "local authorities," taking their cue from both, actually in many districts go the length of prohibiting their erec- tion. The cheapest and roomiest cottages, therefore, cannot be built ; while benevolent investors are de- terred from interfering by another cause, which may be briefly described as newspaper foolishness. If cottages are to be provided for moderate rents, the rents must be ready-money rents, and be paid, by the month, week, or year, with inevitable regularity. There is only one way, as all tradesmen know, to ensure that regularity, and that is to stop the supply if the bill is not paid ; and this, of course, in every other ready-money business is actually done. It cannot be done, however, in the cottage business, for the journalists have forbidden it. They care for the suffering of the individual rather than for the general happi- ness of the community ; and as eviction involves individual suffering, they, to the extent of their power, forbid it. They would not permit the French law, under which a policeman may remove a defaulting tenant within an hour of default, for the world, and practically insist that two or three defaults shall be allowed, and that even then the tenant shall be coaxed or persuaded into giving up possession. If any other means are employed—out of London, that is —the owner's life is made a misery to him by public denunciation such as hardly falls to the lot of the money- lender or the publican. Benevolent persons of our day cannot endure that treatment, while ordinary men of business will not endure it, the consequence being that the business of cottage-building falls either to Societies which care nothing about abuse without personal application, or to men who, if they can but make 10 per cent., will count social obloquy in, as pawnbrokers do, as part of the expenses. It is a most extraordinary state of affairs, and, for our parts, we see no remedy for it except higher wages, and an entire abandonment of the idea that any artificial lowering of rent in aid of wages is in any way a generous, or even an admissible system. The idea of some reformers that land- lords should be compelled to build cottages, is pure injus- tice, unless all employers are compelled to house all whom they employ ; and the notion of ordering the District Councils to do it is visibly futile. The parish could not build a bit cheaper than individuals can, and would probably spend more money ; the Council would be obliged to ask full rents to get even 4 per cent., and, taught by endless plunder, in the shape of bills for repairs, they would soon become the meanest and most arbitrary landlords in the country. Moreover, even if they built the houses, the original difficulty, the rate of wages, out of which rent must come, would remain entirely unaffected. It is the absence of a free market, and not landlords' cruelty, which leaves cottages in so many English villages a disgrace to a generation which, if it believes in anything whatever, believes in sanitary science.
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