CHAPTER XVI

RESULTS OF OVERCROWDING

THE Housing of the Working Classes Commission reported in 1885 that inquiries in low neighbourhoods showed "that upon the lowest average every workman lost twenty Overcrowding. days in the year from simple exhaustion" and inability to work owing to the depressing effects

Results of

of bad housing.

In Dr. Mair's investigations it was found that the excess of mortality from pulmonary disease and diseases of young children was 40 per cent. greater in back-to-back houses than in the ordinary dwelling-houses. Again, evidence in support of the view that these diseases are both more prevalent and more fatal in insanitary than in sanitary houses is to be found in the annual reports and returns of the medical officers of health of the large urban communities. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, were so much impressed by the importance attaching to sickness, due to con

Housing in its
Relation to

Disease.

ditions in which people live and work, that they appointed two special investigators to report on the relation of industrial and sanitary conditions of pauperism, and bad housing conditions were placed second only to casual and irregular employment, as a cause of pauperism through disease and demoralization.

"The insanitary conditions of a house," says the Royal Commission, "are so frequently due to the character of the people living in it, that it is sometimes difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Housing conditions produce or aggravate certain illnesses,' and the following are stated to be housing conditions injurious to health

(a) Dampness is likely to produce chill, catarrh, kidney affection, rheumatism, heart disease, phthisis only indirectly.

(b) Want of ventilation in the house may cause anaemia; while want of ventilation about the house favours infection, produces lassitude and may cause anaemia.

(c) Bad privy arrangements favour diarrhoea, enteric fever,

etc., etc., possibly many other diseases like scarlet fever, phthisis, etc.

(d) Darkness produces anaemia and want of vigour; conceals dirt and infection, and so favours disease like phthisis.

(e) Overcrowding favours the spread of all kinds of infectious disease, phthisis, enteric, small-pox, pneumonia, septic disease, etc. (f) Dirt and slovenliness favour phthisis, vermin, skin disease, and all infectious illnesses.

Speaking at the Royal Institute of Public Health in July, 1914, Dr. A. S. M. Macgregor, tuberculosis officer for the City of Glasgow, The describing features in the city incidence of tuberOne-Apartment culosis, said the house incidence of fatal phthisis Houses. in Glasgow for three years gave the following figures

During June, 1911, he visited all the cases at home in two of the poorest wards in the city. houses the light was only fair. windows almost or quite closed. was 3-8, and in the cases visited the weekly income per person, after deducting rent, was—

In the majority of one-apartment
Nearly half were dirty, with the
The average number of inmates

This part of the subject may be summarized by two quotations. Professor Alfred Marshall says1—

But the conditions which surround extreme poverty, especially in densely crowded places, tend to deaden the higher faculties. Those who have been called "the Residuum "of our large towns have little opportunity for friendship; they know nothing of the decencies, and the quiet, and very little even of the unity, of family life; and religion often fails to reach them. No doubt their physical, mental, and moral ill-health is partly due to other causes than poverty, but this is the chief cause.

The pamphlet on Housing, published by the Ministry of Reconstruction,1 repeats the proved fact that bad housing conditions and overcrowding have a very serious effect upon human health--

Bad housing conditions affect not merely physical health but the general standard of life. How is it possible to keep a home clean and comfortable if it consists of two rooms only, while the family number fourteen? How is it possible to maintain decency when there are insufficient bedrooms to separate the sexes, or when-as is not uncommon in some of our townsthere is only one sanitary convenience to six tenements?

When we consider the average workman's home, contemplate his surroundings, gauge the scope of the education that has been permitted him, and weigh his opportunities for selfUnrest. respect, for home pride and moral and spiritual advancement, it is not to be wondered at that there

The Labour

is discontent and unrest.

We are often told, by ministers of religion and others, that the poverty and misery of large numbers of people in this country is a scandal to Christianity. This is quite true, and could scarcely be otherwise, for a system of which the mainspring is self-interest cannot be expected to result in consequences which are acceptable to the Christian conscience.

2

The questions thoughtful men are asking themselves to-day assuredly suggest the development of a new social conscience (says Professor W. Jethro Brown). Men want to know whether poverty, ignorance, stupidity and crime are not avoidable. . . Such questions as these are not confined to speculative dreamers; they are asked by men and women of every class. They evidence a divine discontent which, while it has its dangers and is apt to blind the vision to the immense value of the victories already gained, is a proof of the enduring power of the ideas inherited by the twentieth century from the nineteenth.

It is, of course, quite true to declare that the labour unrest is of modern development, but all movements for reform have been preceded by a period of agitation and unrest. At the present time the reasons are obvious. Of what advantage is it to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who toil in our manufacturing towns, that high wages are exacted as the result of unions, of political pressure and of strikes? What enjoyment in life has been secured as the result of this unrest? From 1900 to 1910 wages were nearly stationary, while prices went up by leaps and bounds,

1 Reconstruction Pamphlet, No. 2.

2 The Underlying Principles of Modern Legislation, p. 94. (John Murray.)

as shown by the official returns of the Board of Trade. It is clear that the stationary wages and rising prices mean decreased comfort and increased sense of depression. The falling-off of purchasing power, whether connected in the worker's mind with the rise in prices or merely felt as a hard fact, is calculated to produce unrest. And this unrest extends also to the housing problem. Speaking at Liverpool on 14th June, 1912, upon the occasion of the opening of the Bevington Street Housing Scheme, the Earl of Derby said that they heard "a great deal nowadays about industrial unrest. It would be idle to say that the sole cause of it was discontent of habitation, but to a very large extent it must be allowed that bad housing in the past had contributed in a large degree to that discontent. The man who lived in a gloomy, unhealthy neighbourhood must of necessity be affected by his environment, and still more must his children who grow up amidst such surroundings be affected."

The Royal Commission appointed early in July, 1917, to inquire into the causes of industrial unrest divided Great Britain into eight areas, and separate Commissions examined the causes of unrest in each of these areas. In their Reports the Commissioners in seven out of the eight districts specifically drew attention to the fact of insufficient and bad housing being a cause of unrest. The Commissioners for the North-Eastern area pointed out that "the housing question was put forward as one of the general causes of industrial unrest, which should, in the national interest, be dealt with at an early date." The report for the Yorkshire area emphasized the necessity for a large programme of social reform after the war, "including especially sufficient increase in and improvement of housing accommodation." The Commissioners for Wales said: "It is clear that unsatisfactory surroundings and inadequacy of housing accommodation are factors of great importance in the causation of unrest."

It must not be forgotten that forty years of compulsory education have created in the minds of the men and women who have benefited by the system a desire for better things, of which improved housing and better environment are not the least. There has also been the wider culture which such movements as the Adult Schools, Co-operative Union, the Workers' Educational Association, and Ruskin College, Oxford, have done much to advance. That these

movements are gradually having their effect, and that this effect will be progressive, cannot be doubted. They are growing daily, and groups of intelligent and informed workers are springing up all over the country, and, if housing is one of the main reasons for labour unrest, their recognition of that fact has made the solution of the problem all the more urgent and vital.

John Ruskin, the centenary of whose birth we have recently celebrated, has thus expressed this view: "Your first business is to make your homes healthy and delightful; then keep your wives and children there, and let your return to them be your daily 'holy day.' "1

Those who are in sympathy with the workers and think that they ought to, and must, get a bigger share of the world's goods, are not sorry to see this unrest. But to the man who is quite content with the manner in which wealth is at present distributed, and only wants to enjoy his own income, without recognizing his duty to his neighbour, it must be most disquieting and discomforting. 1 Fors Clavigera XXII, vol. 1, p. 450.