be of the meanest description. There are landlords who deem any sty good enough for their labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent.[1] It may be but a ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden—but the labourer is helpless against the wrong.… And the Nuisances Removal Acts … are … a mere dead letter in great part dependent for their working on such cottage owners as the one from whom his (the labourer’s) hovel is rented.… From brighter, but exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice, that attention should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts which are a reproach to the civilization of England. Lamentable indeed, must be the case, when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their mere numerical insufficiency. For years the overcrowding of rural labourer’s dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For again and again in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of epidemic disease in rural districts, have insisted on the extreme importance of that over-crowding, as an influence which renders it a quite hopeless task, to attempt the limiting of any infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been pointed out that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences which there are in country life, the crowding which
- ↑ “The employer … is … directly or indirectly securing to himself the profit on a man employed at 10s. a week, and receiving from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent for houses not worth £20 in a really free market, but maintained at their artificial value by the power of the owner to say ‘Use my house, or go seek a hiring elsewhere, without a character from me.’… Does a man wish to better himself, to go as a plate-layer on the railway, or to begin quarry-work, the same power is ready with ‘Work for me at this low rate of wages, or be gone at a week’s notice; take your pig with you, and get what you can for the potatoes growing in your garden.’ Should his interest appear to be better served by it, an enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases by the owner (i.e. the farmer) as the penalty for leaving his service.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.)
