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dealt with by your Committee acting as the Sanitary
Authority. For instance, many of the rooms in question are
the large rooms originally specially constructed for and
formerly occupied by weavers. As is well known to
members of the Council, these rooms are well lighted and
ventilated, and have a cubic capacity of about 2,500 feet, so
that legally a man, his wife, and eight children under say
ten years of age, can legally live and sleep in such a room.
For sleeping purposes only, the number of children may be
increased by two under the age of ten years, whilst six
adult persons of either sex may legally occupy such a room
for the purpose of a dwelling so far as cubic space and legal
overcrowding are concerned.
Your Committee do not express any opinion as to
whether such single room dwellings are desirable in any
circumstances. They simply report the facts of the situation
as it stands, and as it is generally understood in daily
practice.
Overcrowding, as is very well known by all students of
social conditions, is a poverty problem, one of the resultant
products of irregular or total loss of employment. In all its
prime essentials it is simply a social and economic question,
requiring far deeper and broader treatment than the service
of a few sanitary notices, no matter how often the service of
such notices may be repeated.
That overcrowding, with all its deplorable aspects,
exists in this and in every other poor class quarter, is, unfortunately,
only too well known, and your sanitary officers
are constantly serving notices and causing the worst cases
to remove from room to room and from street to street until
they disappear into some other locality of a like nature,
to be replaced in this by a like migratory population of
similar habits and conditions of life to those displaced.
Consequently, it is a fact that the bulk of overcrowding is