644 REPORT—1904. 
value’ of the modern higher rented house. It seems to me that fresh air, and 
quiet sleep at nights, and surroundings which would react on the character and 
conduct of the person on whom so much depends—the wife—might easily add far 
more than sixpence to the earning power of the household. : 
There is, unhappily, a class to whom this does not, directly at least, apply 
There are thousands of workers whose wages are not 17s., but an average of 12s.— 
regular workers, and workers who could not take sixpence off their liquor and 
tobacco for the reason that they neither drink nor smoke. I mean women workers. 
And to these, I submit, a good house would have a greaier ‘ productive value’ 
than to men, for they are more subject to the illnesses and little ailments and 
depression which dock their wages by hours in the day and days in the month. 
So far as I can see, they are outside the housing question altogether, from the fact 
that they could not afford an independent house even at the lowest municipal 
rents. ‘They must remain in the family as subsidiary wage-earners, or club 
together, or lodge. ‘ 
(2) But assuming the very strongest case, that there is a class of unfortunate 
people who absolutely cannot afford to pay sixpence a week more, I should still 
say that this in itself is no reason why the Municipality should build. To supply 
them with houses under the market rate would be to introduce a new precedent 
and principle into Government industries which would lead us far. It would be 
using the credit of the entire body of the ratepayers to subsidise one small class 
of them ; it would be, in essence, similar to the old legislation which kept down 
the price of bread when the harvest was bad, without the extenuation that such 
a measure kept down the price to everybody. It would be a rate in aid of wages. 
And if there is any lesson to be learned from the bitter experience of a century 
ago, it is that the evil of a rate-in-aid is, not so much that it punishes those who 
have to subscribe to it,as that it punishes those who receive it, in that it effectually 
prevents wages from rising. 
The employer in towns has certain economic advantages over his rivals out- 
side. He is at a centre of supply of all the agents of production and at a centre 
of demand for his goods. The play of competition balances this by imposing on him 
in general the charge of higher wages—a consequence and possibility recognised by 
the trade-union practice of fixing the standard wage slightly higher in town than 
in country. Unfortunately there is in all large cities a class who, from physical 
and mental disqualifications, from want of education and technical opportunity, 
and from want of organisation, must take very much the lowest wage which will 
keep them in life and moderate animal efficiency; and this class tends to be in 
over-supply from the fact that misfortune drains into it the failures of all the 
other classes. The existence of this class is a public misfortune; their low wages 
are not only bad of themselves, but they go to the very root of the future of 
labour, in that they prevent the children from getting out of the class. Rising 
rent, the natural etfect of a large population and great business premises competing 
for a limited area of situation, is the healthy deterrent of the abnormal influx of 
such labour. For a Municipality to give these unfortunate people houses sixpence 
a week cheaper is to allow of them accepting sixpence a week less of wage than 
the circumstances would otherwise force the employer to give. It is not, of 
course, that employers, taking advantage of the helplessness of this class, would 
deliberately force their wages down by sixpence. It is that, in the present highly 
specialised organisation of industry, unskilled labour is in less and less demand, 
while, from the circumstances mentioned, it tends to be in over-supply ; and this 
surplus labour offers itself for any wage that will keep it alive. As Mr. Booth 
says, ‘the poverty of the poor is mainly the result of the competition of the very 
poor.’ To deny such a causal connection between wages and public subsidies on 
the ground that it is ‘only sixpence a week,’ or that ‘people do not come into 
cities because they can get cheap houses,’ is like refusing to believe in natural 
law because one cannot actually see the minute movements which constitute its 
operation. If, then, it becomes known that, in addition to the other attractions 
ot a city, good houses at slum rents are assured to everyone who is poor enough, 
it seems to me inevitable that this will further tempt the influx of unskilled 
