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practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point
of view, there is, in my opinion, a very important sanitary context to be added. It
must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a
rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it.
Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the
physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which
intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly
destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than
food – against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate
protection – dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which
overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture
there will have been scarcely any
‒ even cleanliness will have been found costly
or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every
such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be
where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least
fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of
public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air.
Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when
it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of
terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very
serious moment.... These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered
that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all
cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the in-door
operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part
excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work
can be deemed self-supporting.... And on a very large scale the nominal self-
support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism.”
51
The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the
working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which
capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic laws are known. It is
otherwise with the “housing of the poor.” Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the
centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the
labourers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more
miserable are the dwellings of the working-people. “Improvements” of towns, accompanying the
increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks,
warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for
the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding
places. On the other hand, every one knows that the dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to
their excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit
or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi. The antagonistic character of capitalist
accumulation, and therefore of the capitalistic relations of property generally,
52
is here so evident,
that even the official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on “property
and its rights.” With the development of industry, with the accumulation of capital, with the
growth and “improvement” of towns, the evil makes such progress that the mere fear of
contagious diseases which do not spare even “respectability,” brought into existence from 1847 to
1864 no less than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in some
towns, as Liverpool, Glasgow, &c., took strenuous measures through their municipalities.
Nevertheless Dr. Simon, in his report of 1865, says:
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“Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in England.”
By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the conditions of the housing of
the agricultural labourers, in 1865 of the poorer classes in the towns. The results of the admirable
work of Dr. Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on
“Public Health.” To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later. On the condition of town
dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a general remark of Dr. Simon.
“Although my official point of view,” he says, “is one exclusively physical,
common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored
.... In its higher degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such
negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions,
such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To
be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and
deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its
curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure
hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects
aspire to that atmosphere of civilisation which has its essence in physical and
moral cleanliness.”
53
London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human beings.
“He
feels clear,” says Dr. Hunter, “on two points; first, that there are about 20
large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable
condition exceeds almost anything he has seen elsewhere in England, and is
almost entirely the result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the
crowded and dilapidated condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse
than was the case 20 years ago.”
54
“It is not too much to say that life in parts of
London and Newcastle is infernal.”
55
Further, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small shopkeepers and other
elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more and more under the curse of these vile
conditions of dwelling, in proportion as “improvements,” and with them the demolition of old
streets and houses, advance, as factories and the afflux of human beings grow in the metropolis,
and finally as house rents rise with the ground-rents.
“Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more than one
room.”
56
There is almost no house-property in London that is not overburdened with a number of
middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in comparison with its yearly
revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of it again at a jury price (the
expropriation valuation fixed by jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value
arising from the neighbourhood of some large establishment. As a consequence of this there is a
regular trade in the purchase of “fag-ends of leases.”
“Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to do as they do – get all they
can from the tenants while they have them, and leave as little as they can for their
successors.”
57
The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In consequence of the making of railroads
in the City,
“the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London of a number of families
wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty worldly goods on their
backs, without any resting place but the workhouse.”
58