architecture; while they do not house the poorer people who were dispossessed, because these cannot afford to live in them. The only thing that can be said about the architectural features is that the law at present requires the new houses to find room for as many people as inhabited the old, and the only way to do this and avoid overcrowding is to make tall buildings. It is admitted by those who are supporters of municipal building that the time will probably come when the present structures will be replaced by different and more desirable ones. In the meanwhile it does seem to me that the London County Council has done well, considering the legal restrictions, and the difficulty and expense of securing much land. With regard to the dispossessed poor, it is argued that if superior accommodations are provided for the better class of workers, they will vacate other premises, and so there will be a general move upward all along the line. This is no doubt a valid argument, up to a certain point; but the slum difficulty will not be overcome without more radical action than the council is empowered to take, and it is evidently unreasonable to expect so great an evil to be removed at once.
Mr. Bernard Shaw deals with the housing question at some length in his excellent little book, The Common Sense of Municipal Trading. He compares the disadvantages of a municipality, under the present law, with the freedom of private enterprise, and the specific instances he gives are worth citing:
If the obligation to rehouse were imposed on private and municipal enterprise alike, municipal housing would be at no disadvantage on this point. But commercial enterprise is practically exempt from such social obligations. Within recent years Chelsea has been transfigured by the building operations of Lord Cadogan. Hundreds of acres of poor dwellings have been demolished and replaced by fashionable streets and "gardens." The politics of Chelsea, once turbulently Radical, are now effusively Conservative. The sites voluntarily set aside by Lord Cadogan for working-class dwellings on uncommercial principles of public spirit and personal honor have not undone the inevitable effects of the transfiguration of the whole neighborhood. The displaced have solved the rehousing problem by crossing the river into Battersea. Thus Lord Cadogan is more powerful than the Chelsea Borough Council. He can drive the poorer inhabitants out of the borough; the council cannot. He can replace them with rich inhabitants; the council cannot. He can build what kind of house pays him best—mansion, shop, stable or pile of
