CHAPTER XII

LANDLORD AND TENANT

At number seven there's nob'dy lives, they left it yesterday; Th' bum-baylis coom an' marked their things, an' took 'em a' away. They hardly filled a donkey cart--aw know nowt wheer they went-- But they say th' chap spent his brass o' drink instead o' payin' th' rent.

SAMUEL LAYCOCK: "Bowton's Yard."

In this branch of the law it cannot honestly be said that the legal position of the poor is very different from the legal position of the rich. Given private ownership of land and the right of a landlord to distrain for rent in arrear, and seize and sell his tenant's goods to pay himself, it does not seem that the law or the way in which it is administered is better or worse for rich or poor. The law of distress is, as its name implies, a harsh and cruel remedy and the shadow of it hangs nearer and darker over the cottage porch than over the doors of the eligible mansion, but it is there in both places. To a weekly wage owner paying an exhausting rent out of a pitiful wage, the ever present right of his landlord to distrain, whilst it nerves him to make every effort to keep a clean rent book, must be one of the sad and depressing elements of daily life that the middle classes do not experience so directly. It is pleasant to record--what is in fact my experience--that whatever may have been true of the cruelty of landlords in other times and places the landlords of to-day owning cottage property are not a harsh race. They themselves, especially the poorer ones, have their own troubles. The rates have to be paid, the by-laws to be observed, the notices of the sanitary inspector to be obeyed, and perhaps the fact that they themselves have to ask for time to pay and to sue for leniency from corporations and other officials leads them to be tender with their own underlings. Certain it is that in the putting in force of the right to evict a tenant the landlord is very long-suffering. This last step is not usually taken until the rent is many weeks, or often months, in arrear. Even when an eviction order is granted, I have known many cases where a landlord renews the tenancy and collects the arrears at small instalments.

Eviction orders are very often asked for not in the landlord's own interest but in the community's. The necessity to do the sanitary requirements of public bodies is a constant source of eviction. The tenant having no neighbouring house to go to clings to the undesirable shelter he has got until the forces of the law turn him out in the interests of hygiene. Another curious cause of eviction is a woman's tongue. A lady with what is technically known as "a tongue" will set all her neighbours by the ears; houses on each side of her domicile rapidly empty, and at length the whole street comes to the landlord demanding that she shall go or threatening to depart themselves.

The lady with "the tongue" of our day was, and as far as I know still may be, known to the law as a common scold, and according to Chief Justice Holt was punishable by ducking. Mrs. Foxby, of Maidstone, was, if I remember, the last lady who was indicted at common law for this offence and sentenced to be ducked. She moved, in Trinity Term, 1703, in arrest of judgment because they had called her in the indictment "_calumniatrix_" and not "_rixatrix_" and insisted on her motion, although Chief Justice Holt in kindly warning reminded her that ducking in Trinity Term was pleasanter than ducking in Michaelmas. As the Court pointed out, mere scolding was not the offence, it was the constant repetition that was the nuisance. In the result, after a year's litigation the flaw in the indictment saved the Maidstone lady a ducking in the Medway.

But though the common scold and the ducking stool no longer figure in the quarter sessions calendar--though it would rest with the Court of Criminal Appeal to decide if they are yet entirely obsolete--the woman with a tongue, the "_rixatrix_," or lady brawler is undoubtedly still existent and has to be dealt with by the landlord of small property by County Court eviction.

What is called a possession summons is taken out, and in the hearing of it the lady always appears and protests vigorously against the treatment meted out to her, arguing that the street is in a conspiracy against her, and that she is the one quiet peaceful woman in the neighbourhood. Any doubt as to the correctness of the judicial decision in making an eviction order is solved as soon as the order is made, when, self-restraint being no longer necessary, the full force of "the tongue" is turned upon the landlord, the judge who is in league with him, and the two stalwart members of the force who with some difficulty show the lady the door. Next to dry rot and vermin, a tenant with "a tongue" is the greatest enemy of the landlord of mean streets.

But what has long been recognised about the status of landlord and tenant, is that under present economic circumstances it is impossible for a wage-earner to obtain at the expenditure of a reasonable proportion of his income proper housing for himself and his wife and children. The duty of the State to the poor in this matter is gradually dawning on people's minds, they are waking up to the fact that it cannot be done solely by individual effort, and on this subject the law, I am glad to report, is beginning to make serious efforts to set its houses in order.

At present legislation has taken upon itself three objects: (1) The clearing of slum areas and rebuilding new dwellings, with powers of compulsory purchase granted to local bodies. (2) The granting to corporations and councils power to close insanitary houses, and to make their owners repair them. (3) The permission to local authorities to build houses for the working classes where there is an insufficiency.

We are a slow moving race. We generally do our legislative reforms by a succession of statutes vigorously fought over and hacked about by gay party spirits whose nearest idea of patriotism is to queer the other fellow's pitch and spoil his budding statute by crimping amendments that he knows will make it unworkable. We have only gone a little way with the Housing business as yet, and if the next statute on the matter could be put in the hands of a small committee of both parties to draft and bring before the House, perhaps we should get somewhat nearer finality.

It is rather melancholy reading to pick up the latest pamphlet of the bookstall on the Housing Question and find much of the writer's ingenuity wasted in trying to prove that his party, and his only, has in the past made any effort to better the housing of the people, and that in the future there is only one honest capable scheme which is worthy of consideration. There is not much real help in these essays. Their burden is always the same. Recollect at the Election time--"Short's very well as far as he goes, but the real friend is Codlin--not Short."

The truth is that neither party has done very much. The history of the matter is much as follows: Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities. Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. This truth has not been taught us by the priests and politicians of our time, but by our men of letters.

Dickens knew all about it and prophesied in despair that we should have to wait for five hundred years for reform. You remember Tom-all-Alone's where Jo lives: "It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who, after establishing their own possessions took to letting them out in lodgings. Now these tumbling tenements contain by night a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly to do it."

Maybe you could not find to-day an exact replica of Tom-all-Alone's; certainly we have swept away acres of them, but it is still worth while to read and remember such descriptions, if only to remind ourselves what the poor have to suffer if the law remains powerless and inert in the compulsory provision of decent housing. People grumble at State interference, but they forget what made it necessary. Rampant individualism led to housing workmen in the tailor's shop, described by Alton Locke "a low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspirations, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of threads, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and smoke."

When we are wondering how far it is our right and duty to interfere between a man and his house property or whether it is incumbent upon the nation to take upon itself the burden of housing its people, it is useful to look on these pictures of England in the glorious days of Queen Victoria and Albert the Great and Good. The problems were there then, but it was not the statesmen who saw them and urged their solution.

Nor was it only sentimental Radicals who painted in lurid colours the horrible houses of the people. D'Israeli, in "Sybil," draws an eloquent picture of the narrow lanes of the rural town of Marney, which might be any country town of the South of England--the rubble cottages with gaping chinks admitting every blast, with rotten timbers, yawning thatch letting in the wind and wet, and open drains full of decomposing animal and vegetable refuse, spreading out here and there with stagnant pools--these things were common-places in the homes of rural England in 1845.

"These wretched tenements," writes D'Israeli, "seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep, without distinction of age or sex or suffering. With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of child-birth gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilisation, surrounded by three generations, whose inevitable presence is more painful than her sufferings in that hour of travail; while the father of her coming child, in another corner of the sordid chamber, lies stricken by that typhus which his contaminating dwelling has breathed into his veins, and for whose next prey is perhaps destined his new-born child. These swarming walls had neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather or admit the sun or supply the means of ventilation, the humid or putrid roof of thatch exhaling malaria like all other decaying vegetable matter. The dwelling rooms were neither boarded nor paved; and whether it were that some were situate in low and damp places, occasionally flooded by the river and usually much below the level of the road, or that the springs, as was often the case, would burst through the mud floor, the ground was at no time better than so much clay, while sometimes you might see little channels cut from the centre under the doorways to carry off the water, and the door itself removed from its hinges, a resting place for infancy in its deluged home. These hovels were, in many instances, not provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dung heap on which every kind of filth was accumulated for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dung-hills."

Science, medicine, philanthropy, sanitary engineering and enlightened local government have done something to remove many of the horrible things D'Israeli describes, but one cannot say that the law has co-operated with much vigour in this beneficent crusade. Without law and compulsion the work will never be done as thoroughly as is necessary throughout the length and breadth of the land.

The eloquent outcry, from writers of all creeds and parties, demanding better houses for the people at length made itself heard within the walls of Westminster. But it was not until 1868 that the Torrens Act was passed, the first attempt of the Legislature to deal with slum property. This was followed by the Artisans Dwelling Act of 1875, which enabled local authorities to compulsorily purchase slum areas and re-build sanitary dwellings. In Birmingham, where Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was mayor, magnificent use was made of these powers to the great present benefit of the city. In Liverpool, Manchester, and other towns something was done, but as the business depended in the main on local initiative, and the spending of money, much more remained undone.

A few small measures were passed, but they did not lead to any great practical work being put in hand, and again it was the man of letters who wakened the national conscience. I remember well in the eighties the appearance of "How the Poor Live" by George R. Sims and the interest and sympathy it aroused. There is no exaggeration in the book, but merely a graphic record of fact, and it proves with melancholy certainty the small progress that had been made since the days of Dickens, Kingsley and D'Israeli.

It was with a great chorus of self congratulation and the loud braying of journalistic trumpets that on March 4th, 1884, a Royal Commission was announced to inquire into the Housing of the Working Classes. It is almost forgotten to-day, but in its time it aroused great hopes in the breast of social reformers. Sir Charles Dilke was Chairman, the Prince of Wales himself was a working member of the commission, Cardinal Manning, Lord Salisbury, Samuel Morley, Jesse Collings, Henry Broadhurst and other great public men of the day were his colleagues.

The overcrowding, the immorality and disease and waste caused by bad housing, the terrible tax of rent on the incomes of the poor were all rehearsed in painful detail before these great ones of the earth. But when one comes to remedies and recommendations, there is nothing except the most trivial and inadequate propositions that the eminent ones can agree upon.

Their first suggestion is that vestries and district boards should put in force existing by-laws, though who was to make them do it is not mentioned. Then they think it would be an added decency to the lives of the poor if there were more mortuaries near their homes to take the dead bodies from the already overcrowded rooms--as though the problem they were there to consider was not the housing of the quick, but the housing of the dead.

Building by-laws, sanitary inspection, and workmen's trains are a few of the Mother Partington Mop remedies that this great Commission had to offer to keep back the sea of troubles that overwhelmed the poor of our great cities in their struggle for decent existence.

One cannot blame the members of the Commission that so little was suggested. It was inevitable when one remembers that nothing at all is possible in the right direction without a great upheaval which is bound to re-act injuriously on some of the greatest vested interests in the country. A meeting of the great ones in whom the interests vest is not likely to bring about immediate reforms.

But at all events here in the pages of the printed evidence are the facts. The horrors painted by D'Israeli, Kingsley, Dickens and George R. Sims are at least patiently collated and indexed for us, and now after thirty years we should do better not to expatiate on the little we have done for betterment, but to acknowledge how much we have left undone, and show our repentance in energetic deeds. No one can recognise more clearly than I do the value of such authoritative evidence of facts and details as are collected in the report, but the reading of them only makes one the more impatient at the method of government which can tolerate the continuance of such abuses.

In 1900, little or nothing having been done, it occurred to Lord Salisbury that it was time to have another Commission. But it was not until 1902 that a Select Committee of both Houses was appointed to consider, in Lord Salisbury's own words, how to get rid of "what is really a scandal to our civilisation--I mean the sufferings which many of the working classes have to undergo in order to obtain even the most moderate, I may say the most pitiable accommodation."

The problem could not be better stated. The scandal was with us in 1885, it was with us in 1900, and it is with us to-day. At least if we are unwilling or incompetent to solve it let us have done with the constant consideration and further consideration of Royal and Select Commissions which only make the hearts of the poor sick with promises and hopes that can never be fulfilled in our own generation.

One cannot here set out in detail the various Housing Acts that have been passed; there was one in 1900, which apparently led to more insanitary houses being closed than new cottages built. There was another in 1903, with further new provisions and modifications of former schemes, and lastly comes the Housing and Town Planning Act, which deals rigorously with owners of insanitary property. This Act industriously made use of may help to realise our hopes of the possibility of hygienic pleasances for the poor of future generations.

Here we have a short record of some fifty years of legislative effort--more or less honest--in which each party has sought to promote measures to help the poor who are oppressed, as Lord Salisbury said, by this "scandal to our civilisation," the want of decent housing. And yet how little has been achieved, how small the results, how disappointing to find the great men who talked in Parliament and sat on Commissions and discussed these matters with so much learning and ability passing away and leaving this problem for us to tackle, and we on our part looking idly on and still wondering what can be done. If our schoolmasters had taught us how to make bricks and build with them instead of how to read books and write more of them, better results perhaps had been already achieved.

There are many acres of houses in England built prior to 1870 that exhibit all the slum traits that have been so eloquently described in literature, and many millions of our fellow citizens live in houses which fall below the minimum standard of sanitation where the decent separation of the sexes is impossible and the general conditions of life are sunless and miserable. The amount of overcrowding in England and Wales is shown graphically enough in the census returns for 1911. Overcrowding from a census point of view means that more than two persons live in a room, counting the kitchen as a room, but not the scullery. "Thus," as the Editor of the Land Inquiry Report tells us, "if a tenement or cottage consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen, the Census Authorities would only describe it as overcrowded if there were more than six persons living in it, no matter how small the rooms. The Census test of overcrowding is, in fact, quite inadequate to measure the full extent of the evil, and there is great need for the adoption of a more accurate one. Even adopting this standard, however, the Census Authorities find that one-tenth of the total urban population of England and Wales are overcrowded. This means that nearly 3,000,000 persons are overcrowded."

No one who is constantly meeting the victims of this state of affairs, and discussing with them, as a County Court Judge has to do, their domestic affairs, can fail to be struck with the large amount of infantile mortality and disease, and the prevalence of tuberculosis and the general physical and moral weariness and debility, which may in a great measure be traced to the bad conditions in which the working classes must perforce live because there is nothing better obtainable.

The price paid for such accommodation as there is, is a cruel tax on the working man. For the meanest shelter he has to pay anything up to twenty per cent. of his weekly income. Imagine a man with a thousand a year spending two hundred a year in rent alone. How eloquent would the Official Receiver be did bankruptcy supervene, as it probably would, and what homilies he would preach on the rash and extravagant folly of the bankrupt in spending so large a proportion of his income on a house. And yet this extravagance is compulsory to a working man, who has to pay out of his wages for a mere roof over his head money that is badly needed for the food and clothing of himself and his family.

I have dwelt on this subject at some length because in most of the chapters of this book my complaint has been that the laws are insufficient to help the poor, because they have in past days been enacted by the rich, and are still being administered by the rich, without knowledge of, and sympathy for, the best interests of the poor. Here the problem is entirely different. Everyone must admit the energy and good faith of all classes and parties and officials, within the rules of the party game, in their endeavour to cope with a condition of things which is an admitted national disgrace, and a scandal to civilisation. The melancholy conclusion, however, stares one in the face. The result of interminable inquiries and committee meetings and palaver is plain unmistakable failure. The fringe of the subject has scarcely been reached, and the state of affairs which the man of letters portrayed to the shame of our grandfathers is likely enough, it would seem, to be "copy" for our grandchildren and their grandchildren to journalise with world without end Amen!

And although it would be impertinent in me to pretend to have a remedy for these evils where all the great ones have failed to bring about reform, yet I cannot help thinking that the reason of the failure is the reason of much of our legislative failure--the dread of vested interests and the permissive character of the statutes passed. What is the good of asking a town council of builders and landowners and estate agents to put in force laws that will, or at least are expected to, have the effect of diminishing their incomes? Should I, or would you, enforce an Act of Parliament with any joyful energy when we knew that the more thoroughly we did it the more we should be out of pocket? It is asking too much of human nature.

There has been a clear failure in the smaller local governing bodies in putting in force even such legislation as exists for the betterment of the district. The Rivers Pollution Acts are a standing instance of the neglect of duty by local councils. For years nothing was done to put the Acts in force, because the smaller polluters were the mill owners, who were members of the local council, and the biggest polluter of all was the council itself pouring crude sewage into the river to relieve the rates. Parliament lacked a sense of humour when it expected mill owners and sewage boards to prosecute themselves for river pollution.

Good work in housing will never, I think, be really effectively done until it is left to the initiative of a medical officer of health or a sanitary engineer, with judicial power to order things to be done and force behind him to have them done. The idea that a medical officer of health should be a servant of the casual butchers and bakers of the Town Council is, on the face of it, an absurd one. He should be as permanent and independent as are the stipendiary, the judge, or the coroner, for he requires even more than common fearlessness to deal roundly with the jerry builders and slum owners who are his aldermen and councillors, and who at present sit on a committee of appeal from his decisions.

As long as these matters are left solely to local bodies the real burden of financial consideration, the lack of personal knowledge of hygiene and sanitation among the members themselves, and the shrinking from enforcing legal hardships on the poor owners of bad property, will alone prevent effective reform. To these natural and honest forces must also be added the weight of vested interests, which deliberately obtain power on local bodies for the purpose of preventing housing reform being put into thorough operation.

Never was there a greater and louder demand by the people for a fair share of the land they live in. The countryman wants his plot and his cottage, and the town dweller a decent house at a reasonable rent. This is the "condition of England question" to-day as it was eighty years ago. Never were there more earnest and sincere people discussing what is to be done and how it is possible to transform slums into decent dwellings by Act of Parliament. We have a willing legislature, a desire to make laws for the benefit of the poor, and after many efforts the result has to be written down as failure and stagnation. It would almost seem as though voluntary effort in this affair had pronounced itself impossible, and it remains undealt with until those who are the real sufferers by the system feel strong enough to put it right.

Carlyle in an eloquent passage cries out in his passionate way: "Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical. Whose land _was_ this of Britain? God's who made it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of God's creatures had a right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes, they; till one with a better right showed himself. The Celt, 'aboriginal savage of Europe,' as a snarling antiquary names him arrived, pretending to have a better right, and did accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that piece of God's land; namely, a better might to turn it to use--a might to settle himself there and try what use he could turn it to. The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession and tilled."

Interpreting this passage as one written in the true frenzy of prophecy, two things seem to me to take clear shape in the future outlook of the housing question. In the first place, it would seem that it will have to be settled by a Celt, and in the second place it will not be achieved "without pain to the bisons."

One would have thought that a better plan would be a small business parliamentary committee of all interests with power to enforce their decrees against owners and corporate bodies. Something permanent is necessary, akin to the Imperial Defence Committee, which knows no party politics. Are we not here in the face of a real danger to the nation? Already endeavours have been made to take this matter out of the common rut of party politics, but these efforts have not been altogether successful, and if the matter is not settled soon there would seem nothing for it but a forcible solution and a merry set-to between the Celt and the bison, in which we may expect the Celt will get the better of the bison but we cannot be sure that the poor will get all they need even from the Celt.