Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/28

22 them, much more than to the working men themselves, the vice and misery of drunkenness are due. The working men have yet to learn the method of their misery; when they attain this knowledge, and have also learnt the lesson of Co-operative Stores, they will promote societies to build on freeholds only, and will look for public sympathy in their determined, just repudiation of the modern leasehold system of house tenure.

There is a general, vague idea that because large freeholders appear to have some slight control, a better class of houses is erected under leasehold tenure than would be the case if each man had his separate freehold. It is hardly necessary to argue out this question: the result of this insuring system is around us, and the inhabitants of London are, for their wealth and culture, the worst housed population on the globe. Nowhere in Europe can be seen such lines of paltry houses, with such cribs of rooms; and never was a people similarly subject to a landlord's interdict, prohibiting, by means of physical obstruction, ordinary social and domestic intercourse.

Two generations back, when urban leaseholds had become the rule, there still remained an old-established institution that afforded some relief. The parlour at the public-house was then the regular resort of heads of families and young men of the middle, tradesman, class. There politics were talked and parish business was discussed, and there the French were valiantly defied, the slave-trade was denounced, and parliamentary reform was carried. There each company of sturdy boon companions, mostly sons of yeomen, sat and talked throughout the evening, with high argument; and if at times their logic was defective and their information incomplete, they had the benefit of manly intellectual intercourse, and their bright mother wit was exercised and sharpened. These strong men, although a fragment only of the population, gave a tone of vigour to the public mind which cannot be expected from a generation who throughout their lives have been shut up