328 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



sanitary conveniences were conspicuous by their absence. As an 

 example of still lower type there may be instanced a degenerate 

 group of four men, two women and three children who occupied 

 a shack in a clearing of the woods in the neighborhood of a New 

 England town until they were finally dispersed by the authori- 

 ties. 



Such cases can be duplicated almost anywhere. In all of them, 

 with scarcely an exception, the housing conditions are vile, the 

 equal of anything in the slums of the towns, and yet in the opin- 

 ion of the writer the problem which they present is not essentially 

 one of housing reform. In this respect the particularly bad hous- 

 ing of the rural districts is quite different from that of the towns. 

 City slums are due in large measure to land and business specula- 

 tion, utilization of land for dwelling house sites which is too 

 valuable for this purpose, an inequitable system of taxation, the 

 lack of any housing law worth the name, inadequate supervision, 

 and a disposition on the part of some landlords to exploit their 

 tenants. These are causes which are in no way connected with 

 the character of the families living in the slums, and their opera- 

 tion can be checked by right legislation honestly enforced. 



The slum spot in the open country, however, is not so much due 

 to social or economic causes beyond the control of the occupant 

 as it is to his own mental and moral deficiencies. Land specula- 

 tion, speculative building, methods of taxation, the greed of land- 

 lords, none of these in most cases has anything to do with it. 

 Such dwellings are the natural expression of the lives of the 

 shiftless, feeble-minded, immoral, drunken or criminal people 

 who inhabit them. It is not a better housing law which is re- 

 quired here so much as it is the labor colony, the penitentiary, 

 the almshouse, and the home for moral imbeciles. These social 

 plague spots are the cause of enormous public expense and are 

 a steadily increasing burden upon the industry and thrift of the 

 community. They should be accurately registered, carefully 

 studied, and each one should be disposed of upon its own merits. 

 All this will cost much effort and money but not a tithe of what 

 it will cost twenty, thirty, or fifty years hence, and incidentally 

 it will wipe out the country slum. 



Dr. W. C. Stiles, of the U. S. Marine Hospital Service, states 

 that of 3,369 farmhouses in six different States 57 per cent, have 



