Page:The State and the Slums.djvu/11

7 grape—a sanction they would never dream of applying in hard fact. Once more, then, we find ourselves face to face with the old dilemma. So long as the shiftless and flabby-minded folk are there, socialism, piecemeal or wholesale, is impracticable. Once they are got rid of it is no longer wanted. If piecemeal Socialism is to be put in practice, it will not be long before it becomes wholesale Socialism. But as a matter of fact it will never be put in practice. We shall probably see the building of a good many new model lodgings, some by private beneficence and some, perhaps, with public money. A certain number of "slums" and "rookeries" will be pulled down, and their inhabitants will again herd where they can, so that not impossibly their last state will be worse than their first. I am not defending the rookery, but simply pointing out the great difficulties that lie in the way of its reform or abolition. The most carefully constructed lodging may become a rookery in the course of time, by the mere multiplication of the family inhabiting it. This is an evil which no inspection or manipulation will cure. But unless every house were placed under inspection where any working people might under any circumstances lodge, the process of creating rookeries would be a much more rapid one. Every one who disliked inspection—and their name is legion—would abandon the inspected houses. The evil in short lies deeper than can be reached either by Mr. Hyndman's revolutionary remedy of a State regulation of wages, or the popular remedy of a State inspection of houses. Apropos of this question of inspection, it is edifying to observe how the journals that discuss the housing of the poor, from the Pall Mall on the left to St. James's on the right, one and all manifest distrust of the elected bodies—the vestries—in whose hands at present rests the enforcing of sanitary laws. One correspondent contrasts the good effect of police inspection under the Common Lodging-Houses Act with the carelessness or selfishness of vestrymen and vestry doctors in regard to the sanitation of tenement houses. Another insinuates, or rather, openly declares,