Page:The State and the Slums.djvu/18

14 When due allowance has been made for the somewhat violent language in which these suggestions are put forward, it will be seen that they do not differ in substance from those urged by Earl Grey, in a very wise and temperate letter to the Times of 24th November, 1883. Whether the remedies suggested by the Earl or the Capitalist would work, is a matter for practical consideration. For reasons given in former pages, I am myself tempted to think that neither set of suggestions could or would do all that is expected. But the remarkable part of Mr. Chamberlain's project of legislation is its preamble. Is it possible he can really think that the ground landlords in London, or in any other town, are responsible for the condition of the houses in which "toilers" dwell? If Mr. Chamberlain were not misled by a theoretical prejudice against landed property in general, he could not fail to see that the one thing a ground landlord cannot do is to obtain a profit out of "arrangements which make his property a public nuisance." A landlord leases his sites in the first instance to builders, for periods of great length. When the building leases fall in, and the houses become the landlord's direct property, it is almost invariably an object with him to lease them for periods, shorter indeed than the original building lease, but always of considerable length. As long as houses are in the hands of a building lessee, or his representatives, the ground landlord can derive no profit from them beyond the rent reserved in the lease, and can exercise no control over them outside the covenants contained in that document. Even when the buildings come into the landlord's own hands, he almost invariably proceeds to make fresh arrangements whereby the control passes from himself to some one who is more or less of a middleman between the head landlord and the occupant who lets lodgings or tenements. It is a very rare thing, indeed, to find a London house let by the year, or for less than three years, even to the person supposed to be the immediate occupant. Seven years is probably the commonest period of agreement in an occupancy letting. What is true of London is true, mutatis mutandis, of all