Page:The homes of the working classes and the promises of the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.djvu/7

3 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain took upon himself the task of replying to the statesmanlike proposals of Lord Salisbury. He would lay upon the owner of the land the onus of providing better dwellings, in place of those which have in the lapse of years fallen to decay; a proposal which is foreign to the law, and which is manifestly unjust, the landowner in most cases having let out his land on lease for a long term of years, at a rental which seldom returns more than three or four per cent, on the capital invested.

The question, however, we have chiefly to deal with is Mr. Chamberlain's right to be heard again upon the subject, after the broken faith and the utter financial failure which have characterized his clumsy efforts to deal with the question in Birmingham.

On the 27th of July, 1875, the Town Council of Birmingham, seduced from its common-sense and business capacity by the glamour of the eloquence of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, appointed a committee to prepare an improvement scheme under the recently-passed Artizans' Dwellings Act of Sir Richard Cross and the late Conservative Government. That Act gave to municipal authorities powers to acquire properties in crowded and unsanitary districts. There were in Birmingham at that time several such districts which might have been dealt with under the Act. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, then Mayor of Birmingham, and the one light before which the rushlights of the Corporation paled their ineffectual fires, had visited Paris, and conceived the idea of planting trees in the streets, which have persistently refused to grow, although nourished with liberal sewage and moistened with Corporation water. At this period Mr. Chamberlain, no doubt, formed the project of erecting a street of palaces which should vie in architectural splendour with the boulevards of the Continent. Mr. Chamberlain at once seized upon the Act of Sir Richard Cross for the purpose of carrying out what was called a great improvement scheme, and in bringing that scheme before the Town Council he made the distinct promise that in carrying it into effect one portion of the plan would be to provide better dwellings for the working classes displaced by the destruction of property necessary to carry out the scheme.

Having aroused the sympathy of the Council and the town by a heartrending description of the miserable condition of the wretched inhabitants of the slums which formed a portion of the scheme, Mr. Chamberlain said, "We want to make these people healthier, we want to make them better, and I want to make them happier. Just consider for a moment what forlorn and desolate lives the best of these people must live in courts like these. It makes my heart bleed when I hear the descriptions Mr. White and other persons, who are well