THE SINS OF LEGISLATORS. 9 



(in sixty years, from £1 to £8 IO5. for a fourth-rate house), which, 

 joined with other causes, had obliged him to abandon plans for indus- 

 trial dwellings he had intended to build — besides agreeing with 

 " Architect " that this evil has been greatly increased by the difficul- 

 ties of land-transfer due to the law-established system of trusts and 

 entails, he pointed out that a further penalty on the building of small 

 houses is inflicted by additions to local burdens ("prohibitory im- 

 posts " he called them) : one of the instances he named being, that to 

 the cost of each new house has to be added the cost of pavement, 

 roadway, and sewerage, which is charged according to length of front- 

 age, and which, consequently, bears a far larger ratio to the value of 

 a small house than to the value of a large one. 



From these law-produced mischiefs, which were great a generation 

 ago and have since been increasing, let us pass to more recent law- 

 produced mischiefs. The misery, the disease, the mortality in " rook- 

 eries," made continually worse by artificial impediments to the increase 

 of fourth-rate houses, and by the necessitated greater crowding of 

 those which existed, having become a scandal. Government was in- 

 voked to remove the evil. It responded by Artisans' Dwellings Acts ; 

 giving to local authorities powers to pull down bad houses and pro- 

 vide for the building of good ones. What have been the results ? A 

 summary of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated 

 December 21, 1883, shows that up to last September it had, at a cost 

 of a million and a quarter to rate-payers, unhoused 21,000 persons and 

 provided houses for 12,000 — the remaining 9,000 to be hereafter pro- 

 vided for being, meanwhile, left houseless. This is not all. Another 

 local lieutenant of the Government, the Corporation of London, work- 

 ing on the same lines, has cleared four spaces amounting to several 

 acres ; but has unhappily failed to get them covered with the substi- 

 tuted houses needed, and has thus added a further thousand or two 

 to those who have to seek homes in miserable places that are already 

 overflowing ! 



See, then, what legislation has done. By ill-imposed taxation, 

 raising the prices of bricks and timber, it added to the cost of houses, 

 and prompted, for economy's sake, the use of bad materials in scanty 

 quantities. To check the consequent production of wretched dwell- 

 ings, it established regulations which, in mediaeval fashion, dictated the 

 quality of the commodity produced ; there being no perception that, 

 by insisting on a higher quality and therefore higher price, it would 

 limit the demand and eventually diminish the supply. By additional 

 local burdens, legislation has of late still further hindered the building 

 of small houses. Finally, having, by successive measures, produced 

 first bad houses and then a deficiency of better ones, it has at length 

 provided for the increasing overflow of poor people by diminishing 

 the house capacity which already could not contain them ! 



Where, then, lies the blame for the crying evils of the East- 



