270 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND. 



how or other the four good men and true 

 are rarely forthcoming. This the townsman 

 cannot perhaps understand — the fear that the 

 countryman still has of the powers that be, 

 the fear that even if he gets what he wants he 

 will be severely punished by the employing 

 class which he has for the time outwitted.^ 



Now that the Finance Act has put the 

 wholesome fear of taxation upon owners, and 

 so checks them from placing a fictitious value 

 on land simply because it is wanted by a 

 public body, sites will, we may hope, be 

 more easily found. There still remains the 

 difficulty, however, of building cottages to let 

 at a rent as low as the old insanitary cottages 

 which ought to be condemned and vacated. 



Whilst the cottagers who live huddled 

 together in overcrowded insanitary cottages, 

 without even a clean and adequate supply of 

 water, feel that any move on their part toward 

 getting a new cottage, through a public body, 



1 A striking exceptiou has recently been made (January 1912) 

 by the labourers of East Stowj who bombarded the Local 

 Government Board so persistently with complaints, that the 

 hostile Rural District Council have agreed to build forty new 

 cottages. Yet we learn from Sir Arthur Boscaweu (in the 

 House of Commons, 15th March 1912) that whilst 1344 cottages 

 have been closed under the 1909 Act, only 116 new ones have 

 been built. 



