Page:The English Peasant.djvu/83

 into the world devoid of that shame which is the natural safeguard of youth. He had not lived forty years amongst the poor without seeing the evil influences of over-crowded houses. In fact, he saw it from his very door. Where was immorality bred? But too often under the influences arising from miserable and crowded dwellings."

The Rev. E. Gurdon, in a paper read before the Norwich Diocesan Work Association, stated that when cottage-building is left to speculators, instead of the comfortable, old-fashioned, clay lump building, with its thick walls and deep, heavy, substantial, thatched roof, a small clay lump house, with a red-tile roof, and walls thin and pervious alike to heat and cold, is generally erected. And this is only one sample of the benefit the poor get from the arrangements of modern civilisation.

In the winter of 1863-64, the proprietors of the Norfolk News sent one of their staff to report on the state of the cottages in various parts of the county. The tours were made in company with Mr Samuel Clarke, sanitary inspector to the city of Norwich, and some idea may be formed of the extent of the inquiries made by the fact that the reports give in detail the condition of two hundred cottages.

The misery revealed was both shocking and scandalous. Take this picture of a Norfolk village. "A stranger cannot enter the village without being struck with surprise at its wretched and desolate condition. Look where he may, he sees little else but thatched roofs—old, rotten, and shapeless—full of holes and overgrown with weeds; windows sometimes patched with rags, and sometimes plastered over with clay; the walls, which are nearly all of clay, full of cracks and crannies; and sheds and outhouses—where there are any—looking as if they had been overthrown very early in the present century, and left in the hopeless confusion in which they fell." The first hut entered was a fair sample of the whole. Notwithstanding the cracked clay walls, half-dismantled roof, and tottering chimney, it was occupied by a man and his wife and six children, who advanced in age from one to fourteen. The six children slept in one small, ill-ventilated chamber, and the parents in another. Both these rooms were without plaster, and the sides of the roof were supported by sticks placed across—"for,"