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contributory causes—and, not least, malnutrition—to
account for the physical condition of many children
revealed by the Medical Inspection, yet overcrowding
is an important contributory cause, of which the
Education Committee of my Council has no control.
My point is that, even our efforts to feed the
children and medically treat them will not be of much
avail if they are permitted to continue in overcrowded
rooms.
That your Chief Sanitary Inspector very rightly
testifies in his excellent Annual Report for 1910. On
page 10 he writes:—
"Fifty persons per acre would be an ideal
"healthy state. Upwards of 160 persons per acre
"is simply fatal to such healthy state, and means
"not overcrowding in the legal sense, but such a
"state of actual overcrowding and density that
"both individual and community alike are stifled
"or congested, and in the natural sequence of
"events the young children, being most weak,
"suffer, and, fortunately, die out the quickest."
It may be the remedy is a slum clearance; it may
be the remedy is the use of the powers under the
Housing and and Town Planning Act and the closing
of some of this property as insanitary, or, on the other
hand, the remedy may be found in a remodelling of
some of the worst houses, as done in Camberwell. But
the fact I want to get at is: Are people overcrowded
in certain parts of your Borough, and, if so, what is the
remedy? I know poverty is the root cause, and to
deal with that some of the reforms suggested in the
Royal Commission on the Poor Law are badly
needed.