this period, not even his own side. To many he appeared a somewhat livelier Mr. Warton, a more amusing Ashmead Bartlett; above all things, a figure never to be taken into the calculations of serious men.

From the House, as his confidence in his powers grew, he passed to the platform, and soon he was able to show by results that he had caught the ear of the multitude. He made some horrible mistakes. His attacks on the Government were shrill, exaggerated, indecorous. He was still regarded as a clever but rather grotesque personage. When he returned from some of his stumping expeditions, he increased the ordinary estimate of his levity by open quarrels with his own leaders; and while people did not think Sir Stafford Northcote an ideal leader, everybody shook his head over the audacity of the attacks on his authority by the aspiring and loose-tongued stripling who had never held even an under-secretaryship. It may be doubted if he had among the ranks of the Liberal party enemies more bitter or more scornful than in the ranks of his own party. The whole forces of the Front Opposition Bench were arrayed against him; and the entire strength of the official hierarchy of one's own party is a very formidable combination. The squires thought him dangerously brilliant, and grossly insubordinate, and several times it looked as if he were going to be incontinently cast out of the ranks. Everybody knows how he has changed all this. His rise in popular favour and in parliamentary influence has been so great and rapid, that it has been seen growing visibly before the universal eye, until now he is perhaps the most popular man of his party out of doors, and in its parliamentary arrangements he can dictate his own terms.

It remains to be seen how far all this may have been due to the inferior talents that make a smart and effective member of an Opposition. He is still untried, and his future is darkly shrouded. He has an unfortunate knack of making great blunders, and of making them at the very worst time. Some of his offences against both taste and tact are almost unintelligible. It is hard to say whether these mistakes were outbursts of temper, or pure want of judgment; or badly calculated estimates of what the great Demos requires. Time will soon tell. He has given mighty hostages to fortune, in assuming one of the greatest places in the Ministry, and his career will soon be made or marred. In any case the new Ministry presents a problem of extraordinary interest in the history of England and of the world generally. The moment of the almost completed emancipation of the proletariate sees the rise of two aristocrats among aristocrats to supreme power. Will the democracy be content to be the Bucephalus of the nobility? T. P. O'CONNOR.

VOL. XIII.

THE HOMES OF THE POOR.

BY DAVID F. SCHLOSS.

At

LITTLE more than a year ago "the Bitter Cry of Outcast London" was in the hands of many and in the mouths of all of us. that time an active philanthropist who is also a man of the world uttered the cynical prophecy that "the Bitter Cry would cry itself to death." There is much danger that this forecast may prove accurate. And as it is obviously important that so urgent a matter should not be allowed to sink into oblivion, it is hoped that a few remarks upon one branch of this wide subject may be of interest.

The problem which the Bitter Cry presented for solution was one of great complexity; and there is hardly any one of the most pressing social questions that is not more or less involved in the controversy which the attempt to solve this problem has raised. Questions such as the causes of, and the proper remedies for pauperism, the merits and demerits of State-aided emigration, the relations between labour and capital, the effect of the laws regulating the tenure of land, the influence of the abuse of alcoholic liquors, the results of improvident marriages,-all these and many equally difficult arise, when we undertake to consider the condition of our unfortunate neighbours in this vast metropolis. It is not our intention to deal directly with any of these larger subjects.

The question to which the Bitter Cry of Outcast London attracted the immediate attention of the most practical among statesmen and philanthropists, and which it is our purpose briefly to discuss here, is that of the homes of the poor.

There is an appearance of substantiality about bricks and mortar which has gained for this question a precedence in men's minds over others, by no means less important, but which open up vaster and vaguer issues. And the instinctive preference thus accorded will be found to be justified by the facts. The attempt to secure decent and healthy homes for the poor is one which it is imperatively necessary to make, which has already been made in many instances, which, where it has been made, has been fairly successful in the past, and which, as we believe, is destined at no distant a future to attain yet more complete and more conspicu

ous success.

In dealing with the question of the homes of the poor it is

proposed to consider, first, the nature and defects of the existing accommodation, and next, the measures which are, in our opinion, necessary and practicable for the improvement of this accommodation. That the houses inhabited by the working classes are, for the most part, in such a condition as to cause the gravest evils, moral and material, to their inhabitants, and at the same time to threaten with a serious danger the health of the whole community, is now admitted. The statements made by the author of the "Bitter Cry" have been tested, and their general accuracy fully established by the painstaking investigation of a Royal Commission, whose first report, dealing with England and Wales, has recently been issued. This Commission was formed of elements so representative in character, and numbered among its members men of such acknowledged practical ability, as to ensure for the outcome of its labours much attentive consideration. And yet the danger is great that the report of this Commission may meet with the usual fate of such compilations, and that the recommendations which it containsmoderate as they are, even to timidity-may lead to no improvement, and remain barren of permanent result. A document such as this report inevitably, and most unfortunately, presents a forbidding aspect of official dryness. And if it should be objected that there is in this paper but little that is not to be found somewhere in the eighty odd folio pages of the first report of the Royal Commission, and the seven hundred and twentyeight sheets of closely-printed evidence which accompany this report, the apology of the writer consists in his earnest conviction of the importance of calling general attention to the subject.

It certainly appears probable, that besides the " old guard" of philanthropy to whom the facts and conclusions set forth in the Report and Evidence have long been familiar, there are very many persons who, while their strong sympathy with all endeavours to ameliorate the condition of the working classes is unquestionable, have not found the leisure or the opportunity of studying those two very valuable, but somewhat formidable, volumes.

With respect to the existing accommodation provided for the working classes, two main features are strongly presented in the report the overcrowded state of these dwellings and their insanitary condition. Even if houses are free from sanitary defects, yet if they are inhabited by numbers largely in excess of those which they could, with due regard to the laws of health, safely accommodate, these houses must be hotbeds of disease. That a single room is frequently occupied by seven or eight persons is shown by the instances given in the report; and one case of twelve in a room is there mentioned. When one thinks of the smallness of the rooms in the houses of the poor, with their low ceilings, and

their windows, which must, during a great part of the year, remain closed to keep out the cold, and which too often cannot be opened at all for fear of injury to their rotten frames, it is easy to form a mental picture of the state of the atmosphere in these crowded apartments, and to estimate the consequent injury to the health of their inhabitants. We learn without surprise that in some districts the death-rate is disgracefully high. The Report gives an instance (p. 14) of some buildings in St. Pancras in which the death-rate in 1882 was 701 per thousand; and mentions that in Wellington Square, "which was stated in evidence to belong to a member of the St. Pancras Vestry, the rate the same year was 527 per thousand, and in Derry Street 444 per thousand."

To enable these figures to be the better appreciated, it may be observed that the general death-rate for the whole metropolis during the year ending 31st March, 1885, was 20-34; while in the model buildings erected by the Metropolitan Association the rate for the same period was 17.3.

As to the grave danger, from a moral point of view, caused by the overcrowding prevalent in the houses of the poor, no one who reads (for example) that " In System Place one room was occupied by a man and wife with four children, the eldest of 16, in addition to a woman lodger and baby-eight in all-in a room nine feet square" ("Report," p. 8), can have any other opinion than the most sad conviction that such circumstances must inevitably foster immorality too hideous to be thought of without a shudder.

Occupied, as they are, by numbers vastly too large for their area, the houses of the poor are too often in a condition so insanitary, that, even if overcrowding were effectually prevented, their inhabitants must yet remain the constant prey of numerous and fatal diseases.

Should an epidemic of cholera visit this country, an event which many of the best-informed physicians consider probable at no distant date, the mortality which must ensue-first among the poorer people, and then, inevitably spreading, among all classes of the population-would be of a character truly appalling.

These pages are perhaps hardly a suitable place for a full or a technical description of the sanitary defects most commonly to be met with in the houses of the poor. And yet the subject is too important to be passed over in silence.

The report of the Commission, while drawing attention to the great improvement that has admittedly taken place by the substitution of house-drainage for cesspools, points out (p. 9) that "Notwithstanding the great change for the better, the evidence proves conclusively that there is much disease and misery still produced by bad drainage. The work of house-drainage is imperfectly done, frequently in consequence of there being little supervision on the part of the local authorities "; and (Ibid.) that "there is much room for improvement in the matter of ash-pits

and dust-bins." But the evidence laid before the Commissioners as to the condition of the houses of the poor would have furnished material for comment of a much more vigorous character than this.

What is meant by "imperfect drainage" can be best understood by any one who will be at the pains of walking into almost any of the houses in almost any of the back streets of almost any quarter of London. And perhaps in no other way can the state of things which the supineness of the different local authorities, to whom the care of the public health is entrusted, allows to exist in these unsavoury domiciles be fully appreciated. If the outlets of the drains are trapped at all, the probability is that the traps are of the kind known as "bell traps," which at the best are of but little use, and that nine-tenths of these traps will be found to have the loose bell-cover-which is fallaciously supposed to guard the entrance to the drain and to prevent the upward escape of sewer gas-either broken, so as to be altogether futile, or else detached from the trap, lying in a remote corner of the yard, or long since lost and vanished for good and all from the scene. The notorious bell-trap is, in fact, nothing better than a man-trap, entangling its unwary victims in the meshes of infectious disease. The visitor often looks in vain for a dust-bin. Piles of decaying fish, vegetables, and other worse refuse are discovered heaped up in a corner of the yard, if the house has a yard, or in the cellar. Even where a dust-bin exists, it is probably unprovided with a cover; and while it receives all the rain of heaven to breed putrefaction in the olla podrida of its contents, this singular "sanitary appliance" liberally exhales a blended fragrance,omnis copia narium,―intricately compounded of all the most disgusting and deleterious odours. Often, too, the dust-bin will be found in a site apparently chosen on account of its immediately adjoining the principal windows of the back part of the house, which can only be opened at the peril of admitting these noxious stenches. In many cases it will be observed that the bottom of the bin is well below the surface of the yard, which probably slopes towards it, and which pours the "slops" and other water discharged on to the pavement round the base of the dust-bin, into whose walls and foundations this delectable liquor permeates.

The remainder of the surface-water lies in fetid pools in the numerous holes and crannies of the ill-paved yard, while the sink, which should by rights receive all this liquid abomination, will be seen to be raised several inches above the general level of the ground-a position of isolated eminence well befitting its aristocratic inactivity.

As to those brawny ruffians to whom the omnipotent dust contractor entrusts the very responsible task of cleaning out these Augean accumulations of filth, these men rival the hosts of heaven in the infrequency of their appearances; and on their rare visits