THE "COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND."
DURING the recent debate on the Bill for transferring the charge of the poor from the parish to the union, Mr. Villiers quoted some statements from an unpublished return which would he believed when printed alarm the country-. This document has at last appeared, and we can only trust Mr. Villiers's anticipation will be fulfilled. It is a report from Mr. Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council, upon the condition of country cottages, based upon another report drawn up by his able subordinate, Dr. A. J. Hunter, from personal inspection of villages in most of the counties of England and Wales. This gentleman could not of course examine 15,000 parishes, but he visited four or five in every county, examined 5,375 cottages, not taking the worst quarters, but only the poorest, and describes their condition as samples of the accommodation generally furnished to the rural labourer. A more heart-breaking account we never remember to have read. Everywhere throughout England there are villages and districts of villages in which the villagers are housed like swine, entire families pigging together in one room, and often taking in lodgers, till every rule not only of civilization, but of ordinary decency, is of necessity laid aside. In such places the cottages are ricketty, tumble-down concerns, with doors and windows insufficient to keep out the wind, thatch which stinks and lets in the rain, without gardens, without privies, or with arrangements worse than none, without drainage, and in most cases with rents driven up to an almost unendurable point by the crushing competition for room—a competition caused by the dis- like of owners to allow the poor to remain, and so possibly swell the rates. In all such places the families are overcrowded, 2,195 of the houses examined having one bedroom only, though in- habited by 4,918 adults and 3,906 children, an average of 2I adults and 2 children to every bedroom. This average, however, is merely deceptive, for there are houses in which the parents, fighting for bread, take in lodgers to an extent limited only by the actual area of the floor. In Wargrave, in Berkshire, for example, the rents are so high compared with wages that the cot- tiers all take in lodgers, and in Barrack Row, where all the cots have two bedrooms, "a married pair with 2 children received 4 bricklayers, a pair with 3 received 2, a pair with 6 received 3, and altogether there were in the 12 houses visited 24 bedrooms containing 37 adults and 38 children, beside one house containing one person only." In Steventon, in the same county, "the bed- room measured was 13 feet by 6 feet 9, with a slanting roof. In it slept 5 adults and a child. In each of 3 others slept 4 adults with 3 children, but one made a bed in the scullery; in 1 a father slept with his son and daughter, all adults. I visited 10, hi which were 33 adults and 22 children,—more than 5 to a bed- room. The beds covered the floor, and the people, as they said, 'could feel one another all over.' Half a mile off is a cottage of four room on the ground floor, built by a squatter whose repre- sentatives have now the freehold. It is now divided into two cots, many angled, many sided ; the mud walls bulging in here and out there ; the roof of thatch, and not unclerdrawn. The inhabitants, who are 6 adults with 5 children, drink from the same bad brook." At Hinxton; in Cambridgeshire, "in one very little hut, let at 1s. 4d., though the bedroom was divided, there was but one window, and here slept 9 people ; in another, with an undivided bedroom, there slept 8, of whom 2 slept in the kitchen ; in another, a woman slept with her father, her husband, and her child, and her husband's brother. In 15 bedrooms visited were 32 adults and 26 children." In Gamblingay "8 and 9 people were found in the single bedroomed houses, and in two eases 6 adults slept in a room with a child or two." At Yetminster, in Dorsetahire, "of 22 houses visited 9 had but 1 bedroom ; in one of these was a family of 7 persons, and in another a married pair, 2 adult daughters, and 6 children. For this very old cot was paid 3/. 18s. a year. It had no garden; the privy was roofless. The kitchen was black with smoke, and utterly uninhabitable when the door was closed
if the fire was lit. The roof was a wretched thatch which let in the rain, the kitchen floor was of a loose, irregular, flat stones, lying scattered here and there on the natural surface. There was no grate at all, and an open chimney. In other parts of the vil- lage were a variety of much better cots let at the same rent ; many without gardens ; some without back openings; none had three bedrooms. The cots with two bedrooms contained families of 4 adults and 5 children ; 5 adults and one child, the whole result of the 22 houses being 35 bedrooms, 55 adults, and 47 children." And this one is described as quite an average village. In Doyn- ton, Gloucestershire, Dr. Hunter found a place in which "each tenement had one bedroom, the floors were broken flags and stones, and were wretched. In the first I visited lay 3 beds for 4 adults and a child ; the next held 2 adults ; the next 5 adults ; the next 0 adults and 5 children ; the last 2 adults. These were
5 bedrooms in one house. Of these adults more than half were unmarried. Three of the apartments were on the ground floor, and 2 upstairs, approached by outside steps, each apartment con- sisting of a bedroom and kitchen." It is useless, however, to run through the counties, or to pick out more samples. Everywhere Dr. Hunter found the same evils,—some villages in which the crowding has destroyed all comfort, all sense of physical decency, and not unfrequently all morality. Dr. Hunter says that he restrains himself upon the latter point, and we can- not quote the evils at which he hints, but one case must be given as a feeble hint of the true state of affairs. "Of 35 selected houses in Lubenham, 22 had only one bedroom. The largest families are often forced by poverty into the smallest houses, and it is often said of bedrooms that 'they who do not want them can have them.' In one bedroom lived a married pair, two boys of 20 and 18, a girl of 17, and a grandchild. In another, a married pair with an adult son and adult daughter. In others, a married pair with five children ; a married pair with two adult sons ; six adults and two children, where, however, there was a lean-to out- building in which a part slept ; four adults with two children ; a widower, his two sons, his two daughters, and their two natural (?) children, and so on with the miserable catalogue." Out of houses like these the labourers have to tramp to their work, sometimes miles away, "starting," says Dr. Hunter, "in the dark and returning in the dark, to obtain the privilege of obtain- ing a day's hard work for a shilling,"—a life of melancholy monotony worse than that of the Staffordshire potteries. There Dr. Baker reports that till the Act of 1864 was extended to the pottery trade children of five were broken in to labour, and even now half the operations of brickmaking are performed by growing girls, who live among and with hardened lads of their own age, and one girl in every four has an illegitimate child. Even there, however, if a child survives its misery it can as a man or woman obtain high wages, and there is a rough, wasteful plenty, but the wretched hind of, say Leicestershire—county loved of hunters —toils day by day at a work which never finishes, which yields him barely food of the coarsest sort,—one-fifth of the population having too little even of that, —and offers him for old age nothing except starvation or the workhouse. "Agricultural labour," says Dr. Simon, and we commend the remark to the squires who are always talking of the condition of the factory hands, "instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-work- ing labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism, —a pauperism which during the whole circuit is so near that any illness or temporary failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief." The labourer's condition, too, is getting worse. Every- where the garden or other patch of land which makes to him the difference between comfort and poverty is being taken away, and so wretched is his position that even improvements injure him. Wealthy proprietors, careless of poor rates but acquainted with sanitary laws, pull down the wretched huts and build pretty cottages, and then to keep them neat and orderly and healthy prohibit overcrowding, and drive the labourer to a distance from his work. He has absolutely no remedy, for the proprietor who will not build himself will not sell to other men until, says Dr. Simon, "the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches see fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indul- gence, he is quite peculiarly helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house room on the land which he contributes to till, whether the house-room which he gets shall be human or swinish, whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his poverty,—all this does not depend on his willingness and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends on the use which others may see fit to make of their 'right to do as they will with their own.' However large may be a farm there is no law that a cer- tain proportion of labourers' dwellings (much less of decent dwel- lings) shall be upon it ; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain." And then we prate of our civilization, and won- der that the labourer should 'prefer America, where in the midst of an English-speaking population, and under laws identical with our own he can earn by work no harder than at home a house better than an English bailiff's and three meat meals a day, or if he chooses to go farther west, may have fifty acres of fertile land given him without cost in fee simple by the Government. One-. third of our labourers live in styes, one-fifth have too little food to keep them healthy—that is the net result of the machinery which we pronounce so perfect that politicians have nothing left to do. Suppose they set themselves to remedy that result, to secure to every man in Great Britain who will work ten hours a day a decent hut, and as much coarse food as will keep him from feel- ing the pangs of the hunger threatened by Providence only to those who will not work, and in England inflicted only on those who do. That is surely not a "theoretical," or " dreani3r," or "Utopian," or even " philanthropic " object, and if an impracti- cable one, then most assuredly the civilization which has made it impracticable is sooner or later doomed.
We all know that it is not impracticable, that if these men had arms in their hands, if they were Frenchmen resolved to "live working or die fighting," if they were only civilized up to the point of accepting free passages to America and the colonies, the squires would very soon find that amelioration was practicable enough. The difficulty is to secure it with as little disturbance to our civilization as may be possible, and to this Mr. Villiers's Bill is an important step. That destroys, in part at least, the temptation to drive the labourer afield in order to avoid a possible charge upon the rates. The next is to apply sharply and sternly a law secur- ing to every sleeper in any cottage whatever the convict's cubical allowance of air, say 300 feet, double what some of these rooms afford, and so compel the squires to do what Mr. Thomas D'Eye Burroughes, large proprietor, ei-decant county member, WU recently prosecuted for not doing,—house their labourers nearly as well as their riding-horses. If those laws and a great emigra- tion taken together are found sufficient, well ; if not, it will be necessary to remember that rent is a share of the produce accru- ing after the beasts and men necessary to till the land have been kept in a condition fit to do the tillage. Mr. Simon and Dr. Hunter make a suggestion on that point which proprietors are not very likely to approve. How far, remarks the former, "it has been intended in the English Constitution and law that this kind of unconditional property in laud should be acquirable, and that a lancllord; doing as he wills with his own,' should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend to discuss." And, adds the latter, "it is the division of the bargain into rent and wages that mystifies the whole matter, and has led people to speak of cottage building as a ruinous benevolence, as something like roasting an annual ox, instead of treating it as any other repair of the farm buildings. If a barn roof fall in it would take, if we could estimate the proportion of rent paid for the barn, 50 years' rent to rebuild it ; but no one thinks of looking so at the matter. The barn is necessary to the estate ; the farm lets for hundreds a year, and could not be worked at all without the barn. So the barn is gladly restored. But when the cots become dila- pidated a different rule is applied to what is really the same case." For the present, however, the remedies to be tried are the aboli- tion of parish rating in favour of union rating, and a thorough revision of the law which makes the landlord personally liable for - the state of his labourer's tenements.
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