Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/24

 life endurable for four-and-twenty hours; no delicacy of feeling can exist there, and we cannot wonder at Dr. Drysdale's sad answer in the recent trial: "They do not know what modesty is."

Can there be any doubt that it is the large families so common among the English poor that are the root of this over-crowding. For not only would the "model-lodging house" spoken of above have been less crowded if the parents, instead of having ten children, had had only two, but with fewer children less money would be needed for food and clothing, and more could be spared for rent. The artisan with six children, forced to live in a stifling pair of rooms in a back street in London in order to be near his work, might, if he had only two, spare money enough to pay his rail to and fro from the suburbs, where the same rent would give him decent accommodation; and not only would he have a better home, but the two children would grow strong in the free air, where the six pine in the London street, and the two would have plenty of food and clothing, where the six lack both. Mr. Godwin recognises this fact; he says: "Amongst the causes which lead to the evil we are deploring, we must not overlook the gradual increase of children, while in the case of the labouring man, the income mostly remains the same. . . . As the children increase in number the wife is prevented from adding by her earnings to the income, and many years must elapse before the children can be put to work." "Ought to be put to work," would be a truer phrase, for the age at which young children are forced to help in winning their daily bread is one of the disgraces of our civilization.

Overcrowding in country districts is, naturally, not so injurious to health as it is in the towns; the daily work in the open air, the fresh breeze blowing round the cottage, and cleansing, to some extent, the atmosphere within, the fields and lanes where the children can play, all these things may do much to neutralise the harm to health wrought by overcrowding at night. The injury to health, caused by large families among the agricultural poor, arises more from other causes than from overcrowding; the low wage cannot afford a house sufficiently good, and the cheap ill-built cottage, damp, draughty, badly-drained, brings to those who live in it the fever, and the ague, and the rheumatism so sadly common among these labouring classes. But the moral effect of overcrowding is, as the present Bishop of Manchester