Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/20

14 modern houses and the multiplied delinquencies of builders, these men will, in all things that concern the domicile, bear fair comparison with the occupants themselves, who are absurdly ignorant of everything connected with the scene of their domestic life. The thing that, more than any other, must affect their comfort and their health, they never understand. They trouble all the world with their complaints, instead of thoughtfully considering why they suffer, and determining to get complete and permanent relief.

And yet the public also may be well excused. The leasehold custom has been no invention of the present generation; they were all born to it, and are constantly debilitated by its influence. Leaseholds have denied them some of the most grateful sentiments and fortifying circumstances of domestic life. To occupy a freehold house confers upon its owner a peculiar sense of freedom, clears his mind of vanities, and gives him, consequently, force of understanding: it induces firmness and stability of character, and sets around a man a healthy limit to his aims, if he is wise enough to recognize it. He has naturally an habitual, sympathetic interest in his house which makes it his delightful care; and, consequently, by a noble and expanded selfishness, he rises to be home and house-proud, and in habit self-respecting. 'Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiment in a people than the large and free character of their habitations. The Middle Age architecture and its spacious and lofty rooms, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence, and were a sort of poetic cultivation' (John Stuart Mill).

Such was the character of life on freehold tenure; but of late, on leaseholds, men are never free in sentiment or elevated or enlarged at home. Their 'mean' houses are a gathering of torture chambers, and they enter them with the habitual instinctive expectation of removing at the earliest opportunity.