Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/50

44 contrived and built by workmen, and that modern leasehold houses, 'mean and cramped externals,' are designed by 'architects' and those who imitate their method. We have given to working men the suffrage, and they vote in liberty on our political affairs; might we not also set them free to build, with genuine artisan intelligence, their own and other people's houses?

Society is often well intentioned, and has shown much patronizing interest in working men. But, in the midst of its benevolent career, society may well consider whether it is equal to the task of building proper houses for the whole community of workmen. After such consideration they will probably be led to seek some method by which workmen may themselves secure the first necessity of civilized humanity. The poor man's house, for instance, might be held as freehold, like the rich man's railway, and be made convertible as easily as railway stock and Three per Cents. These things could be done, if people of the upper classes had distinct perception and a favourable will; but here they fail. They are exclusive, as they say, conservative; and by their long infliction of bad laws, and their support of evil customs, by the cost and intricacy and delay of legal transfers, and by the sad maleficence of leasehold tenure, they have kept, and still they keep, the working classes alienated from the soil, and in a state of degradation. We are often told that land is free, is not 'tied up' by any statute. This is only subterfuge. The rich who tell us this can pay the small proportion of law costs upon their own large purchases; but they are negligently, if not of set purpose, willing that the working classes shall be mulcted in a heavy fine — not less than ten per cent., and frequently much more — if they, in their small way, intrude on the great territorial preserve, and seek to hold, or traffic in, the soil in fee. This all, in feeling and in fact, should be entirely changed, and everything that hinders small investments in house property and freehold land should be removed, that men may spend their money