GENERAL NOTE

ALL the powers and duties of the Local Government Board were transferred to the Ministry of Health as on the 1st July, 1919. The book should therefore be read throughout as if "the Ministry of Health was substituted for "the Local Government Board."

"

THE HOUSING PROBLEM

SECTION I

LEGISLATION TO 1909

'The nation in every country dwells in the cottage; and, unless the light of your constitution can shine there, unless the beauty of your legislation and the excellence of your statesmanship are impressed there on the feelings and condition of the people, rely upon it you have yet to learn the duties of government."-JOHN BRIGHT, Speech on Foreign Policy," at Birmingham,

1858.

CHAPTER I

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND PUBLIC HEALTH

THE rapid rise of large industries in England owing to the early start in invention, free trade in raw material, foreign food supply and freedom from continental wars, resulted in

Introduction, increase of towns and the rapid growth of a

population devoted to manufactures.

The movement of ideas was two-fold. The new political theory of Bentham, Mackintosh, Grote, and Mill developed side by side with the economic theory of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Mill. The doctrine of the philosophical politicians was stimulated by the economic doctrine of free trade and laissez-faire.

At a later period the accumulation and use of capital led to the development of industry on a more extensive scale. Companies, trusts, and monopolies developed with many important consequences. The formation of large industrial districts and the localization of industries resulted in an increased separation between capital and labour. Among the chief results of the foregoing movements were the removal of local barriers and the growth of a common social sentiment resulting from the formation of a large wage-earning class and its separation from the class of employers.

The growth of the historic method and of the critical spirit, with its new attitude towards the past, together with the advance of

1-(1752)

science, resulted in a revolution in men's conception of the world they live in. At first scepticism, with a tendency to materialism and self-sufficiency, held sway, but a reaction against this allowed for the growth of philanthropy and the development of the social spirit, of which the principal exponents were Carlyle, Morris and Ruskin.

The efforts of social reformers were supplemented and assisted by the young band of Christian Socialists who gathered round Frederick Denison Maurice, and included Thomas Hughes, Edward Vansittart Neale and Charles Kingsley.

These pointed the way to the organization of labour as such in the trade unions and trades councils; following this up by the encouragement of such working-class organizations as friendly societies and co-operative societies, together with an attempt to form a union between capital and labour. The regulation of industry followed in the passing of the Factory Acts, and thus it came about that the social conception of the possible functions of the State was widened.

To-day, the true conception of State action of a social character is mainly connected with work in which some kind of monopoly is involved. Thus we find that such corporate undertakings as the post office, railways, canals, and mines, or the local ownership of trams, demand State sanction or regulation. In the matter of taxation there is the graduation of taxation, the differentiation of the income tax, the tax on property, and the recognition of the principle of betterment. Finally, the State has extended its functions to the regulation of the conditions of labour and life beyond the factory legislation of the nineteenth century. In the newer Poor Laws, legislation relating to agriculture, medical inspection and treatment of, and provision of meals for, school children, and insurance against invalidity and unemployment, are evidences of a wider social view of the State's functions. wider conception the Housing legislation is due.

To this

During the greater part of the period which elapsed between 1760 and the passing of the Public Health Act of 1875, those responsible for the government and administration of our cities seem to have been blind to the need for the exercise of forethought and care, and as a nation we entered upon a period of growth and change quite

Early Movements.

unparalleled in our history, without any kind of governing principles of town development, and with an almost complete absence of responsibility for good administration. The nation was hopelessly unready for the new order of things. Political philosophers were committed to a policy of individual liberty exaggerated until it meant social anarchy. Landlords and manufacturers were eager to build up fortunes, and, whilst tenacious of rights, were forgetful of duties. Municipalities were so ineffective and corrupt that in 1835 a Municipal Corporation Act had to be passed to lay anew the foundations of good municipal government. The people were so careless of their homes that one searches almost in vain in the records of the earlier labour unions for any word of protest against the squalor of the streets and alleys in which the working classes lived. 1

It has been pointed out that socially and industrially the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century form a gloomy period in which it took twenty-five years of legislation to reduce the hours of labour of a child of nine to sixty-nine hours a week, and that only in cotton mills.2

Slowly public opinion, urged on by a growing knowledge of sanitary science, began to demand more stringent control over the ✓ housing of the workers. And so were passed, during the last half-century, a succession of Health and Housing Acts, declaring, at first timidly, but later with more determination, that a matter so intimately concerning the health and welfare of the community should not be left to the unchecked forces of economic supply and demand. It is not practicable here to describe the work of the sanitary reformers who, by their zeal and untiring devotion, built up this sanitary legislation, but a deep debt of gratitude is due to their memory. They placed Great Britain in the forefront of the nations so far as sanitation is concerned―a position which it still holds to-day.

The best tribute to the value of their work is to be found in the steadily declining death-rates. This represents a saving of many millions of lives, and although these lessened death-rates are partly due to the general rise in the standard of comfort and the lessening of poverty, they are mainly due to the sanitary legislation of this period.

1 Aldridge-The Case or Town Planning, p. 114

* Hutchins and Harrison-A History of Factory Legislation, p 81.