358 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



with the people of all classes; you are better acquainted than any one 

 else with their environmental conditions, and you will, I think, agree 

 with me that of these the one most urgently in need of consideration 

 at this moment is their housing. It would take many addresses to deal 

 with the housing question in all its aspects. It is a large question. We 

 have, on the one hand, men with half a dozen houses of palatial size, 

 standing in broad demesnes, empty for the most part or thinly popu- 

 lated by a retinue of pampered domestics, and we have, on the other 

 hand, half a dozen pinched families huddled into one mean hovel reek- 

 ing with filthy effluvium. It is, of course, mainly with the hovel- 

 dwellers that sanitary reformers are concerned, and these present diffi- 

 culties which may well tax their energies for a long time to come. 

 They are everywhere, for from all parts of the country come complaints 

 of over-crowding in wretched dwellings. It is, of course, in the large 

 towns where benevolent enterprise is moving that we hear most of 

 these evils; but they are by no means confined to the great centers of 

 population, in which, however, they are growing at a rate that can no 

 longer be overlooked. Our town population is, as you know, swelling 

 portentously at the expense of the country. Thirty years ago the pop- 

 ulation of England and Wales was equally divided between town and 

 country, but now three fourths of it are town dwellers, while only one 

 fourth remains on the land, and the cry of the town is ' still they come.' 

 According to the last census, the persons enumerated in urban were to 

 those in rural districts as 335 to 100, whereas ten years previously they 

 were as 250 to 100. The increase in the proportion of the population 

 in urban districts is due partly to the growth of these districts them- 

 selves through the absorption of areas which were previously rural, 

 but in a far larger degree to the migration to the towns of country 

 people, and, as the provision of housing accommodation in urban dis- 

 tricts has by no means kept pace with their increase of population, 

 overcrowding has thickened and slums have multiplied. 



I need not describe to you the state of matters which has resulted — a 

 state of matters in many places deplorable and repulsive. We have in 

 London 300,000 persons living in families of two or more in one- 

 roomed tenements in which privacy and decency are impossible, often 

 without the smallest ray of sunshine summer or winter, with walls and 

 floors in every stage of dirt and decay, with an atmosphere that is 

 stifling and not seldom alive with vermin. Mr. Burns told us that not 

 long ago in Glasgow, where the housing problem is being so vigorously 

 grappled with, there were places where the floors of the houses were 

 let out at a penny or twopence a place so that any one could lie down 

 on his pennyworth, and all huddled together for warmth in a dense 

 mass of struggling humanity till the morning came. " There were," 

 he said, " two places where the only accommodation given was a cord 



