THE COTTAGE QUESTION.
OF all the questions which crop up during this Agricultural struggle, none is so puzzling, and at the same time so sickening, as that of Cottage Accommodation. The insufficient housing of the Labourers is the one point upon which every one on all sides is agreed, and yet for which there appears to be the least hope of a sufficient remedy. Landowners acknow- ledge it, farmers admit it, economists lecture upon it, philan-
-, thropists dilate on it, the men complain of it, and Parliament is ready to lend money to ameliorate it, and yet it continues from decade to decade with but little, if any, change for the better. Here and there a great landlord, at an enormous outlay, rehouses the whole of his people, sacrificing, for the most part, any hope of direct pecuniary return for his sunk capital. Here and there, too, a millionaire builds a-model village as an " amenity " to his estate, complaining ever after-
wards of the obstinacy with which his tenants defy the elaborate rules with which, from the best of motives, he clogs and spoils his benefaction. Nevertheless, speaking broadly, and allowing for great differences in different localities, owing mainly to differences in the cost of material, the agricul- tural labourer throughout the South and East of England is of all men, except the very poor Londoner, the worst housed. He very seldom has proper or even decent drainage, seldomer still water fit to drink, and seldomest of all, enough room for a growing family. The cottages may look pretty enough out- side, creepers concealing all uglinesses, but inside they are too often mere styes, undrained, unventilated, and unlighted, with one eating-room and one bedroom, where father and mother, grown-up sons and daughters, possibly a lodger, and usually smaller children, all pig together, in total defiance of even savage notions of decency and health. Parliamentary Blue-books on the subject are full of the most shocking details ; every Commissioner sent to report con- firms the accuracy of their statements, and every man who has ever lived the cottage life, as many of the " agitators" have, makes it the basis of his gravest complaints. There is scarcely a country clergyman in England who will not confess in pri- vate that, next to drink, or even above drink, crowding is the master-evil, and wonder how the people can keep up even the rules of morality they have, and which are not by any means those the clergyman wishes to inculcate. Time brings no remedy for the mischief. Thirty years ago it was so, and the improvement hitherto has been very small. The very latest Blue-book is probably also the most sickening one, and the very latest letter on the subject describes one of the worst cases. Lady Stradbroke, the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant of Suffolk, recently scolded the Bishop of Manchester publicly in the Times for not believing in her idyllic accounts of the com- fort of the labourers, about which the Bishop, having been an Agricultural Inspector, knew about ten times as much as her ladyship did ; yet the Times' reporter finds James Burgess, a man specially distinguished for good-conduct as landlords understand good-conduct, that is, for living on one farm for thirty-six years—praise better suited to a hedge-tree—living after this fashion :— " There was but one bedroom, and, as no children were about, it seemed that one bedroom might do very well for an elderly married couple. Might I see the bedroom? Yes. It was 12 or 13 feet square, and I was astonished to see the floor covered by four beds, which all but touched each other. Then the truth came out. In this one room slept the labourer and his wife, a daughter aged 24, and a son aged 21, another son of 19, a boy of 14, and a girl of seven. The eldest daughter
had been in service, but had just returned in ill-health In this cottage, where the rain would by-and-by trickle in upon the four beds stretched upon the one floor, James Burgess had lived for twenty-eight years, and his wife had borne him thirteen children, of whom five had died, and five, as you have hoard, were now at home. Thirteen births and five deaths in this one little chamber ! Such a fact, and all that it conveys, speaks for itself but too plainly. I will make no comments on it. 'Who owns your cottage ?' I asked.—' It is let to us by Farmer Capon,' was the reply; but it belongs to the Earl of Stradbroke. Like enough, though, Lord Stradbroke doesn't know ho has such a cottage on his estate.' . . . . In Stradbroke, as I have said, all the cottages whore there are children possess two bedrooms, and taking fourteen of these cottages, I find nine with eight inmates, two with nine, two with eleven, and one with thirteen. In Wilby three cottages with two bedrooms apiece have nine inmates. . . . . In Frossingfield, out of thirteen cot- tages inhabited by families, and having two bedrooms, five are occupied by eight people, six by wino people, one by ton, and one by eleven."
Burgess's cottage exists on this very idyllic estate, and the society which gave Burgess his reward has Lord Stradbroke for patron ; Lord Stradbroke, who wishes that old labourers should be helped to keep out of the Union. Every one knows that such cases can be matched all over the Eastern Counties, and that even where the accommodation is fuller, the cottages are so badly built and so badly supplied with water, that when fever once enters it seems unable to get out again, but rages like a plague, as it did, for instance, a few years ago at Terling. In the South matters are even worse, and it is easy to put together from Blue-books accounts of overcrowding, filth, dis- ease, and wickedness enough to sicken men who are not philan- thropists, or who even believe that poverty and misery are
inseparable companions.
We are not about to travel over that well-worn ground again. Nobody whose opinion is worth hearing denies the facts, the only question is as to the remedy for them. We do not believe there is any, except a great thinning of the village population and a great advance in the wages of the labourer, such as the Unions ought in the end to produce, sufficient to enable him to pay a full rent for decent accommodation,—and even then there will be difficulties in the way. The pro- prietor who is expected to build the cottages cannot do it except,
if he is rich, as a grand gratuity ; and the farmer neither can nor will. All manner of experiments have been tried, but the result of all is always the same,—that a good cottage of three rooms and an outhouse, properly drained and ventilated—that is, not built back to back—cannot be completed for less than £150 to £200, without reckoning the value of the site. Five per cent. on £200 is £10 a year, 3s. 10d. a week, and one per cent. of that ought, after the first ten years, to be deducted for repairs. To build fifteen such cottages for every 1,000 acres, a landlord must lay out £3,000, two years' net rental, and look to obtain next to nothing in return. The labourer can scarcely, at the present rate of wages, pay him more than enough to keep up repairs; and the farmer, though he may consider the existence of cottages in the rent he offers for his holding, does not care two straws for the excellence of their design. The people have always pigged, let them pig still. No landlord who lives by the land can part with so much, or will voluntarily subject himself to a perpetual income-tax of two shillings in the pound upon his net rent, for that is what an expenditure of £3,000 upon 1,000 acres
really means. The farmer has not the money to build, even if he had a lease long enough to justify him in doing so ; and as to the labourer, he has not the site, or the materials, or the income to hire either, and if he had, would not be allowed a lease, lest he should be too independent of his employer's orders, or refuse to quit his home on the night he re- ceives his dismissal. The law of supply and demand utterly fails, as it does in so many other cases, the demand for a necessity being endless, but the supply too unprofitable to be kept up, except by little speculative builders, who, by using bad materials, crowding the houses, and giving the people no room, do somehow contrive to squeeze out a precarious profit. Indeed, at the present rate of wages, it is hardly worth while even for the landlord to give the room required, for an extra shilling or two a week is an irresistible temptation, and the labourer who accidentally possesses a good cottage and a moderate family will fill it to the roof with lodgers. The land- lord may remonstrate as he likes, but unless he keeps up the sort of severe supervision which made Mr. Augustus Smith detested in the Scilly Islands, he cannot prevent the abuse, which, indeed, if he took a full rent, he would have no more right to interfere with than the labourer would have to inter- fere with his invitations to his guests. Severe sanitary inspection may do something, but it is very little, for the inspector cannot turn out the cottager's own family, and the lodger, five times out of ten, is connected in some way with his host. Besides, the people do not want to be governed to death, and if too much interfered with, retreat off the land into the villages, already crowded, where, as they say, they can be "sociable like," and independent of minute in- terference.
There is no remedy at all, we believe, for this evil, except large wages, and even when they are obtained, severe inspection will be needed for some years, until education and remonstrance, and above all, habit, have produced a change. The lodger difficulty cannot end in a day, or a year either. The first effect of education will be to increase the number of the un- married, the men waiting till they have saved something ; and the unmarried man in a village is necessarily a lodger, if it be merely for the sake of his food. He cannot cook for himself. The bothie or barrack system of Scotland, which sounds so well to co-operative ears, does not in practice work well, and except in barracks, how is a lad of 20 to live and avoid lodgings? He has no alternative, and though the labourer with a cottage may be free not to take him, in most cases he will find the spare shillings too great a temptation. Till he is richer they are irresistible, and even when he is richer he will, we fear, be some time before he learns, what the well-to-do in England have not learned yet, that rent in the modern world is, and must remain, the heaviest item of expense. A London professional who pays, say, 14 per cent. of his income for his house, thinks himself overhoused, while in the very beat case the labourer will have to pay 20 per cent. Suppose him to pay 4s. a week for a good three-roomed cottage, which is only 5 per cent. on the sum it coats the builder, still, even when he has risen to a pound a week in specie wages, he must pay away for lodgings alone one-fifth of his whole gains. And the evil increases every day, for whether money is losing its value or not, the rise in price of everything that goes to make up a house—in bricks, in timber, in tiles, in labour, in everything except, perhaps, paper—is as undeniable and as visible as the rise in the price of meat.
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