AT the present moment nearly all those parts of East London which are inhabited by working-men of all kinds, from the foreman and the engineer and the respectable craftsman in steady employ at good wages down to the casual and the dock-hand and the children of the street, are suffering from a dearth of houses. In this vast labyrinthine maze of streets—all houses—there are not enough houses. The people are willing to incur discomfort; a respectable household, accustomed to the decencies of life and the wholesome separation of their children from themselves and from each other, will consent to pack them all into one room, or into a work-man’s flat of two rooms in a “model” barrack; they are ready to offer double the former rent, with a tremendous premium on the “key,” but still there are no houses and no lodgings to be had even on those terms. The rents of the lowest tenements are mounting daily; there seems to be no limit in the upward tendency; the landlord is no longer doubtful as to the increased rent he can demand; the rise is automatic, it goes on without any stimulus or grinding on his part. A single room, in some quarters, is the very best that can be hoped for; the rent of that room, which was formerly from three to four shillings, is now six or more, while the charge for the “key,”—i.e., the fine on taking the room,—which was formerly a few shillings, is now a pound or even more.

Meantime, although they are willing to pay the high rents, people are everywhere found wandering in search of lodgings. A workman who has found employment must be within easy reach of his work; if he cannot find lodgings, what is he to do? The workhouse authorities have in some cases risen to the occasion. They agree to take in a man’s wife and family and to keep them at a fixed charge until the breadwinner finds a lodging. He himself seeks a fourpenny bed at a “doss” house—i.e., a common lodging-house.

In some parts it is reported that the overcrowding has actually led to the letting, not of rooms, but of beds; the children are put to sleep under the bed; men on night duty hire the bed for the day; nay, it is even said that beds are divided among three tenants, or sets of tenants. Of these one will occupy it from ten in the evening till six in the morning, another from six in the morning till two in the afternoon, and a third from two until ten. This Box and Cox arrangement would present difficulties with the children.

The situation, which has been growing worse for a long time, has now reached that acute stage in a social problem when it can no longer be neglected by statesmen or by philanthropists. Attention, at least, has been called to the evil—papers are read, articles are written, speeches are made; so far we have got little farther than an understanding of the difficulties which are such as to seem fatal to any proposed remedy that has been yet advanced. For my own part, I have no views except a conviction that something must be done, and that without delay, and that the best that can be done will only be the least dangerous of many proposed experiments.

The subject may appear technical and dry, but it is impossible to speak of work-a-day London without touching on the difficulty of housing the people. A speaker at a recent meeting took exception to the phrase “housing of the people.” He said, which is quite true, that the people are not cattle. We are not, yet we must be housed whether we are rich or poor, or only middling. I am, myself, housed indifferent well, but I feel no comparison with an ox or a cow when I am told so.

The facts of the case were first ascertained by a commissioner for the “Daily News,” and published in that paper early in 1899. The work was carried out by Mr. George Haw, a resident in one of the new settlements. The reader who wishes to consider the subject from every point of view is referred to the volume in which Mr. Haw has reprinted his valuable papers.

It is not probable that the difficulties which any one populous city has to encounter have no lesson to convey to other cities, though the circumstances in each case must vary with the conditions of site, access, and many other considerations. Overcrowding in New York or in Boston would certainly present many features differing widely from those in London. Moreover, the remedy or the alleviations which would serve in one case might be impossible in another.

The principal causes operating to produce this overcrowding are three—the vast and rapid increase of population, the extraordinary development of new industries in East London, with a consequent demand for more labor, and the flocking of country lads into the town.

For instance, there are two places, both lying outside the limits of the London County Council, which twenty or thirty years ago were mere villages or rural hamlets, the churches standing among market gardens and fields, having still their great houses and gardens, the residence of City merchants who drove in their own carriages to and from their offices. One of them, called East Ham, I remember, a quarter of a century ago, as a village spread about on a large area, as if land had no value. It was a flat expanse, fertile, and lying close to the Thames marshes. The map of that time shows farms and farmhouses, almshouses, and a few cottages. This place has now a population of ninety thousand, increasing every day, and consisting entirely of the working-class.

Its neighbor, formerly also a village a little nearer London and called West Ham, presents on the map of 1891 the aspect, familiar to the growing suburban town, of a small central area covered with streets, and with new streets running out north, south, east, and west. It is quite obvious from the map that West Ham was destined to be rapidly built over. It is now a huge town of two hundred and seventy thousand people, also, like East Ham, entirely consisting of working-people. It was at one time a place much loved by Quakers; evidence of their occupation still remains in certain stately old houses, now let out in lodgings; their gardens are built over; the character of the place is changed; the streets are crowded with people; trains and omnibuses run about all day; one of the Quaker’s gardens still survives; it belonged to a member of the Gurney family; the house has been pulled down, but the lordly garden is kept up and the grounds around it have become the park for the West Ham folk. The quickened demand for lodgings has caused the whole of this town to be overrun with streets of small workmen’s houses, containing four or six rooms each, most of which are let to families by two rooms or by single rooms. But the demand still continues; by-streets are run across, narrow lanes usurp the small backyard or little slip of garden; when the whole available space is built over, what will happen next? The crazy condition of these jerry-built houses, after a few years, opens up another and a different set of questions. The case of West Ham represents only on a more rapid scale what has been going on for many years over the whole of industrial London. And now we seem at last to have arrived at an end to the accommodation possible on the old method of small houses and narrow streets.

The results of the overcrowding are, as might be expected, deplorable in the extreme. Among other evils, it kills the infants; it dwarfs those who grow up among its evil influences; it poisons the air; it deprives the house of comfort, of cleanliness, of decency; it drives the man to drink; and it makes the life of their unhappy wives one long-continued misery of hopeless battle with dirt and disease. The late Sir Benjamin Richardson would allow, in his “City of Health,” no more than twenty-five persons to an acre; in some of the outlying suburbs of London there are no more; in others there are, or have been, actually as many as 3000 people crowded together over a single acre of ground. Put them up all together in a solid square; each person will take 2 feet by 1½ feet—that is, three square feet. The whole company of 3000 will stand on 9000 square feet, or 1000 square yards. This is about a fifth of an acre, so that if we spread them out to cover the whole of the acre each person will have no more than a square yard and a half in which to stand, to sleep, and to breathe.

Of course, the first effect of the overcrowding is the vitiation of the air. The extent of this vitiation has been ascertained by chemical analysis. But, indeed, the senses of sight and smell do not require the aid of chemical analysis in order to prove that the air is corrupt and unwholesome. It is poisoned by the breathing of so many; by the refuse that will always be found lying about where a multitude of people are massed together; by all the contributions of all the unwashed. Sometimes the kindly rains descend and wash the pavements and the roads; sometimes the fresh breeze quickens and drives out the malodorous air from the narrow streets, but wind and rain cannot enter into rooms where the occupants jealously keep the windows closed, and fear cold more than they fear the fetid breath of diphtheria and fever; the wind drops; the warm sun comes out; then from the ground under and between the stones, from the saturated road, from the brick walls, from the open doors, the foul air steals back into the street and hangs over the houses invisible, yet almost as pestilential as the white mist of the morning that floats above the tropical marsh.

The magnitude of the evil may be estimated by the fact that nearly a million people have to live in London under these conditions. A whole million of people are condemned to this misery and to the moral and physical sufferings entailed—the degradation of decent women, the death of children who might have grown up honest and respectable men and women! A whole million! We cannot think in millions; the magnitude of the number conveys no impression as to the magnitude of the evil. We can only realize it by taking a single case. Let us take the case of A. B. and his family. He was by trade a mechanical engineer; perhaps they called him a fitter, but it matters nothing; he was a decent and a sober man; he had a wife and five children, the eldest of whom was twelve and as “likely” a girl as one would see anywhere—but they were all likely children, clean and well kept and well fed and well mannered, the pride of their mother. The man had employment offered him in some works. It was absolutely necessary for him to live near his work. He broke up, therefore, his “little home”—they all delight in making a “little home”—and brought his children to live in the overcrowded quarter near his work. After a great deal of difficulty he secured one room. It was no more than ten feet square; in that room he had to pack all his children and his wife and all his effects. There was simply no room for the latter; he therefore pawned them; it would be only for a time, a few days, a week or two, and they would find a house, or at least better lodgings. Imagine, if you can, the change. This unfortunate family came from a decent flat of three rooms, in which the two boys slept in the living-room, the three girls in one bedroom and the parents in the other. They had on the staircase access to a common laundry; the roof was the place for drying the clothes; it was also a place where on a summer evening they could breathe fresh air. In place of this flat they had to accommodate themselves in a single small room. This had to contain all their furniture; to be at once the common bedroom, living-room, kitchen, wash-house, drying-room, dressing-room—think of it! There was, however, no choice. They pawned most of their “sticks”; they brought in nothing but absolute necessaries; they had a large bed, a table, a cupboard, two or three chairs, some kitchen things, and a washtub—little else. And so, uncomplaining, they settled down. It would only be for a week or two. Meantime, the rent of this den was 6s. 6d. a week, and a pound for the “key.”

Outside, the pressure grew worse; the more the factories flourished, the more hands were wanted; new houses were run up with all the speed and all the scamping of work that a jerry-builder could provide, but still the pressure grew. For the man his home brought no comfort; he was not a drinking man, but he began to sit in the public house and to spend his evenings talking; his children could not sit at home; they ran about the streets; the eldest girl, who was so pretty and had been so sweet, began to assume the loud talk and rowdy habits of the girls around her; on the unfortunate woman lay the chief burden of all. She toiled all day long to keep things sweet and clean; alas! what can be done when seven people have to sleep in a room with little more than a thousand cubic feet of air between them all? She saw her husband driven away to the public house, she saw her children losing their bright looks and their rosy cheeks: what could she do? Many of the women around her, giving up the struggle, went in and out of the public house all day. This woman did not. But she was no longer the neat, clean housewife amid her clean surroundings. The stamp of deterioration was upon her and upon the others.

Then the summer came, with a week of hot weather to begin with, and the foundation of the house asserted itself; the house, you see, was built upon the rubbish of the dust-cart. You do not believe it possible? I can show you whole streets in the suburbs which I have myself seen built upon the rubbish of the dust-heap. It contains, among other things useful and beneficial to the occupants, quantities of cabbage stumps and other bits of vegetable matter. So when the hot weather came the cabbage stumps behaved accordingly; the foul air from the foundations crept through the floors and crawled up the stairs and poured under the doors.

First it was sore throat, then it was something else, and from house to house it was spread, and the doctor came and went, and in the broad bed of the little room lay four children sick at once; their soft, white skins were hard and dry and red; their brains wandered; the mother, with haggard face, bent over them.

It is all over now; three of the children lie in the new cemetery; the man has got a house at last; he will not get back his children, nor will the two who are left to him ever be again what they once were. This is one story out of the thousands which may be told of the people who live in the crowded quarters.

Another cause of overcrowding springs from the bad building of the workmen’s houses. It is not only the foundation that is rotten: the house itself is built of bad brick laid in single courses, the woodwork is unseasoned and shrinks, zinc is used instead of lead, the stairs are of matchboard—only the cheapest and worst materials are used. There are laws, there always have been laws, against bad building; there are inspectors, yet the bad building continues. A man who had been an apprentice in the building trade told me how this surprising result of our laws and our inspectors used to be possible twenty-five years ago. “It is this way,” he said; “I was a boy when these houses were built. For a house like this it was £15 to the inspector; for one of the smaller houses it was £10.” We must not believe it possible for such a thing to happen now; one’s faith in human nature would suffer too severe a blow, but when one looks around in certain quarters that little transaction between the honest builder and the faithful inspector recurs to my unwilling memory.

In course of time authority interposes. The houses are condemned. Out go the people, with their sticks, into the street; the houses are boarded up, the boys throw stones at the windows; the place is deserted. But where are the people to go?

There is a riverside parish entirely inhabited by the lowest kind of working-people, chiefly dock laborers and casuals and factory girls. There are literally no inhabitants of a higher class, except the clergy and a few ladies who live and work among the people. There was until recently a population of eight thousand in this parish. But street after street has been condemned; the houses, boarded up, their windows broken by the boys, stand miserably waiting to be pulled down; the parish has lost three thousand of its population. Where have they gone? Nobody knows; but they must go somewhere, and they have certainly gone where the rents are higher and the crowding worse.

Or the London County Council, becoming aware of the insanitary condition of a whole area, condemns it all, en bloc, takes it over, pulls down the miserable tenements and erects new buildings in their place. Nothing could be better; everybody applauds this vigorous action. Yet what happens? I will show you from a single example.

There is an area of fifteen acres in Bethnal Green, one of the worst and most overcrowded parts of London. It contains twenty streets, all small; there were 730 houses, and there were 5719 people. About a third of this army lived in tenements of one room each; nearly a half lived in tenements of two rooms. This area has been entirely cleared away; the London County Council turned out the people, and built upon the site a small town whose streets are fifty feet wide, whose houses are five stories high; water and gas are laid on, workshops are provided, there are only thirty one-room tenements, there are only five hundred of two rooms, and so on; the rent of the two-room tenements is six shillings a week; the center of the area is occupied by a circular terraced garden. Nothing could be better. Moreover, to crown all, the cost of the whole will be repaid to the ratepayers by means of a sinking fund spread over sixty years.

BUT—what became of the five thousand while these fine palaces were being built? Did their condition improve? Or did it become worse during the period of construction? They were turned out; they had to go somewhere; they imposed themselves upon districts already overcrowded, their habits most certainly grew more careless and more draggled, their condition most certainly grew worse. How many of the five thousand will come back to the old quarters and enter upon the civilized life offered to them? I know not; but the experience is that the former occupants do not return.

London in all directions is now thickly planted with the huge, ugly erections called model lodging-houses, workmen’s residences, and barracks. South London, across the river, is especially rich in these erections. Drury Lane, the historic Drury Lane, once the home of Nell Gwynne, the site of the National Theatre, accommodates a vast number of people in its barracks; it is favored also with two playgrounds for the children; both are disused burial grounds—one of them is the burial ground in “Bleak House.”

Opinions vary as to the success of these buildings. Their advantages at first sight appear overwhelming. Step out of a Drury Lane block into one of the courts beside it and a dozen advantages will immediately be perceived by all your senses at once. It is a great thing to be clean if you like cleanliness; to have a sanitary house if you like fresh air; to have conveniences for washing if, unlike Dr. Johnson, you prefer your linen to be clean. But there are certain losses about the block building. I do not say that they are greater than the gains. It has always been the instinctive desire of the Englishman to have his own home, to himself, separate. It is a survival of the early Anglo-Saxon custom when each family formed a settlement to itself. The working-man would like to have his cottage and his bit of garden, and to enjoy his own individuality apart from the rest of the world. In the block he loses this distinction; his family is one of fifty, of a hundred; his children are part of a flock, there is no more distinction among them than in a flock of sheep. There are great dangers attending the loss of the individual; it tends to destroy ambition, to weaken the power of free thought, to injure the responsibility of self-government. This loss is a very great danger among a people whose whole history illustrates the value of a sturdy assertion of self, of personal independence, of responsibility, and of a continual readiness to revolt against any encroachments of authority. For these reasons many regard the barrack or block system with suspicion and dislike.

Other reasons there are which make these flats unpopular, even though they continue to be in great request. They are defects which might be managed by the exercise of a little organization. But it has not yet occurred to the managing bodies of these barracks that the tenants who are intrusted with the votes for the government of the country might also very well be intrusted with the government of their own dwellings. Thus it is complained that a whole staircase is sometimes terrorized by two or three roughs, that there are quarrels and drunken brawls on the stairs at night, that there are continual disputes concerning the day for using the laundry, that the stairs are not kept clean, that the children see and hear and learn things which they should not—but then the children of the streets learn things which they should not; I fear we cannot keep the children from the tree of knowledge. The presence of drunken rowdies, the objection of many to take their share in cleaning the stairs, and other scandals of the kind ought all to be remedied or, at least, attacked by the formation of committees of order composed of the tenants themselves. I have long been of opinion that the real remedy of most of the abuses of our streets and slums would be the organization of the respectable inhabitants into committees of order and the banishment of the police. Such committees in our barrack dwellings should have power of ejectment against evil-doers; they should be their own police.

It is characteristic of the Salvation Army that they sometimes attack a rowdy staircase in their own way by sending two girl lieutenants to take a flat and live there, setting an example of cleanly and orderly life, and bringing round the women to a better mind. I have heard that their success in this work has been marked, and I am prepared to believe it. At the same time, the committee would be a permanent police, while the appearance of the girls can only be occasional and only temporary.

Another result of the barrack life—one which the working-man himself does not perceive—is that the children grow up slow of sight, not short-sighted, but slow of sight. They have nothing to exercise their eyes upon; in the country there are a thousand things; children are always looking about them for the birds, the creatures, the flowers, the berries; in the barracks their playground is an asphalted pavement, with the high houses for boundary walls; there is nothing to look at. When they are taken out for a day in the country, once or twice a year, they see in a bank of flowers only a breadth of color, such as a house-painter might spread; it takes time for them to discern the flowers and the grasses which produce the pleasing effect; one bird is to them the same as another; they are not quick enough to catch the rapid flight of the swallow. One tree is the same as another; they do not discern differences of shape or color in the leaf or in the bough. A few summer days in the country cannot give to that child the training of sight which the country-bred child receives every time it goes out into the open.

Here, then, are the facts of the case: overcrowding, with results most dangerous to the community, and the principal causes—increase of population, rapid development of industries, the necessity of being near the work, the condemnation of insanitary streets and areas. There remain the remedies proposed. We have seen that the erection of blocks, while it provides decent accommodation for a vast number of working-men, turns out a large number into the streets to find what accommodation they can. Obviously, therefore, the further extension of this method would result in far worse overcrowding. The housing in big barracks has also, it has been seen, its own dangers.

We come, next, to the proposal which seems to meet with the greatest amount of favor. It is the creation and erection of industrial villages within easy reach of town—say not more than twelve miles out. The railways would have to sell cheap workmen’s tickets; the villages should consist of three- or four-roomed cottages, each with a scullery and a garden. There should be a common garden as well; there should be no sale of drink in any of the villages; there should be in each a coÖperative store; the rent of a cottage ought not to exceed three shillings a week.

This is the proposal advanced by General Booth of the Salvation Army (“Darkest England,” p. 210).

It is announced (“Times,” February 20, 1900) that the London County Council is about to ask of Parliament an increase of its powers, so that it may buy up land beyond its own limits, with a view of erecting some such industrial villages. We must therefore wait to see the result of this new experiment. We may be quite certain that it will prove to bring with it dangers and evils at present unsuspected, but I think that the gains will be greater than the losses. The country village will be as much better than the barrack as the barrack is better than the narrow and stinking court.

It is hoped that when the advantages of living in the country are understood the men will not mind living at a distance from their work. At the same time, the experiment must be on a very large scale, and if it fails will prove very costly. Objections are taken to the municipality acting as builder and landlord; it is urged that private companies might take up the question; but the experiment made by a private company, if it fails, costs the whole capital advanced by private persons, whereas if the experiment of the County Council fails it will be only the loss of the ratepayers’ money. Whatever is done must be done quickly; mischiefs incalculable are inflicted upon the children by the present overcrowding. To neglect it is to make the evils far worse. The remedy requires a great mind and a clear vision and unlimited powers. As yet little practical attention has been paid to the cry of the houseless and the rack-rented, and to the sobs of the children poisoned physically by the air, corrupt and vitiated, which they have to breathe; poisoned morally by evil companionship, starved and cabined mentally for want of light and air and sunshine, for want of the breeze among the trees and the grass of the meadows and the flowers of the field and the creatures of the air and of the hedge.