Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/17

 (in sixty years, from £1 to £8 10s. for a fourth-rate house), which, joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans for industrial dwellings he had intended to build—besides agreeing with "Architect" that this evil has been greatly increased by the difficulties of land-transfer due to the law-established system of trusts and entails, he pointed out that a further penalty on the building of small houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens ("prohibitory imposts" he called them): one of the instances he named being, that to the cost of each new house has to be added the cost of pavement, roadway, and sewerage, which is charged according to length of frontage, and which, consequently, bears a far larger ratio to the value of a small house than to the value of a large one.

From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a generation ago and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent law-produced mischiefs. The misery, the disease, the mortality in "rookeries," made continually worse by artificial impediments to the increase of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding of those which existed, having become a scandal, Government was invoked to remove the evil. It responded by Artisans' Dwellings Acts; giving to local authorities powers to pull down bad houses and provide for the building of good ones. What have been the results? A summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated December 21, 1883, shows that up to last September it had, at a cost of a million and a quarter to rate-payers, unhoused 21,000 persons and provided houses for 12,000—the remaining 9,000 to be hereafter provided for being, meanwhile, left houseless. This is not all. Another local lieutenant of the Government, the Corporation of London, working on the same lines, has cleared four spaces amounting to several acres; but has unhappily failed to get them covered with the substituted houses needed, and has thus added a further thousand or two to those who have to seek homes in miserable places that are already overflowing!

See, then, what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxation, raising the prices of bricks and timber, it added to the cost of houses, and prompted, for economy's sake, the use of bad materials in scanty quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwellings, it established regulations which, in mediæval fashion, dictated the quality of the commodity produced; there being no perception that, by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price, it would limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply. By additional local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building of small houses. Finally, having, by successive measures, produced first bad houses and then a deficiency of better ones, it has at length provided for the increasing overflow of poor people by diminishing the house capacity which already could not contain them!

Where, then, lies the blame for the crying evils of the East-