Page:The State and the Slums.djvu/12

8 that vestrymen are themselves causes of the grievance. So many of them are owners of tenement houses, that they cannot (he says) be trusted to abate nuisances when the cost will come directly or indirectly out of their own pockets. I am not concerned to defend negligence or selfishness, where it is shown to exist; but I refer to what has been said above as suggesting that in a very large number of cases the obstruction to improvement and sanitation is quite as much the work of the lodgers as of the lodging-house keepers, to say nothing of the actual house owner. As regards these last, indeed, there seems to be no pleasing the philantrophist [sic] and the eager politician. Now it is the Duke of &hellip; who is being denounced as a harsh and cruel head landlord, because his agent takes somewhat abrupt measures for pulling down a tenement house whose middleman lessee has absconded, and which is becoming a nuisance through the neglect or misconduct of the lodgers. Anon it is all the fault of the middleman lessee, who is painted in the blackest of colours as a bloated, grasping, selfish capitalist, wringing sixty or seventy per cent out of the sweat and tears of the poor. As a matter of fact the lessee is quite often enough one of the poor himself—or herself, for tenement houses in a very appreciable number of instances belong to women. As regards the sixty or seventy per cent, some part must certainly be set down to repairs and maintenance of the fabric of the house. A good deal may be fairly written off against the risk and trouble of collection. When all allowances are made, one may be permitted to doubt whether much more is really to be accounted profit than would be held to deserve that name in the case of other trades. However that may be, it would seem as if we were entering upon an era of new and very questionable morality in this matter of the relation of landlord and tenant. Already in one part of the kingdom the rules of contract, and the principles of political economy have been banished to Jupiter and Saturn. In the very heart of the kingdom attempts have been made to apply the same methods to the same subject-matter. The letting and hiring of