THE HOUSING QUESTION 1» 



THE COTTAGES 



Another notorious grievance in the country which 

 strikes to the depths of the whole matter with which 

 we are dealing is the poor and insufficient housing. 

 People often talk of slums in the towns without a 

 suspicion that conditions in several parts of the country 

 are relatively worse. The cleanness of country air, 

 and the picturesqueness of rural decay, combine to 

 mislead. The agricultural labourer is harder put to 

 it than the labourer of the towns to find a decent and 

 solid shelter, for the insufficiency of cottages is charac- 

 teristic even of those parts of the country where the 

 cottages themselves are good. If we lived under a 

 system which required him to pay an economic rent 

 for his cottage, he would be less frequently the victim 

 of low wages. A good deal of jugglery can be done 

 with the nominal-rent system, as the question of wages 

 can be dismissed with the argument that the apparent 

 wages are not the real wages — ^which are something 

 much higher. But the difficulty is to build a cottage 

 for which the labourer can afford the true rent, and the 

 owner of which can get proper interest on his capital 

 expenditure. If that difficulty could be met the whole 

 problem would be quickly solved. Mr. St. Loe 

 Strachey before the war was aiming at building cottages 

 at the almost incredibly low cost of £100. That, or 

 even approximately that price, would finally remove 

 cottages from the catalogue of rural difficulties. 



Mr. Rowland Prothero and others have pointed out 



