Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/21

Rh 'Bees, by the instinct of nature, do love their hives, and birds their nests;' but men can have, by nature, no instinctive love for leasehold houses. Every house appears, indeed, a thing to be avoided; and each tenant feels that what he calls his house is not a home, but something made for 'style.' It was not made for him, nor can it be: he is unsettled, apprehensive, constantly expectant, never satisfied. The consequence has been that every year there is increased mobility among the London population. Their full average length of residence in one house is not three years, and this, in houses of the middle class, is now the ordinary length of term for occupants' agreements. Houses are got up to look, to superficial eyes, superior to their rental; showing that a studiously constructed falsehood is considered an advantage. A similar pretentiousness is carefully maintained in equipage and furniture, that everything may be in keeping; and the tenant thus asserts his vain position in the world. Speculating builders see all this, they learn to know their public, and are quite prepared to please them. They discover that their customers are seldom satisfied with a substantial and convenient, unpretending house, in which the income of the occupant might with propriety be economized, and his display would be within his actual means. The builders see that just the contrary of this is the ambition of the world, and that if some men have the gift of self-respect above the customary reverence for wealth, this class is not the one on which they must rely. They consequently build their houses for the public as they find them, and these houses are, in architectural character and show, fair representatives of popular desire.

Thus the system is continually acting and reacting on the public, and on the houses they inhabit. It induces flimsy-mindedness; men fatuously accept the evil which by leasehold tenure they are made to suffer, and their domiciles reflect the weakness and the want of individuality of those who occupy them. The result is perfectly well known. Though