View report page

136
water are cheap, and few people are so poor that they cannot obtain
them. To the truly poor health officers have always exercised the
greatest consideration, and they will go out of their way to obtain help
for them in their distress. The ordinary slum-makers, however, are
not generally destitute. Often they receive good wages, and there
should be ample means to provide plenty of food and other necessaries
for health and comfort. Sympathy is wasted on such as these. They
must be taught that decency is essential to citizenship; that the house
is intended for a dwelling-place, and not for a refuse heap; that they
are as much bound by the laws of the country as their neighbours;
and that these latter have a right to protection and consideration.
Once they have realised these little details, then they will cease to
be undesirables.
Whilst we are upon the subject of housing in relation to the
Housing Town Planning Act, 1909, it would not be out of place to
quote the President of the Local Government Board who recently
made an interesting statement at a meeting on Town planning.
He said that "They should not judge the Act by the small number of
schemes which had been finally approved, as it was largely desirable
that the whole country should first undergo a preliminary survey. No
other country in the world was making such general and rapid progress,
and he was being asked for advice and information from all parts of
the world. Having been the last to move we were now taking the first
place. Some people thought that the time had arrived for compulsory
town planning, but for the moment it was neither practicable nor
desirable, though possibly in time it might be resorted to. He did not
think that an amendment of the Act was possible perhaps for three or
four years, but the experience they had had would enable them to
shorten considerably the procedure. He trusted that shortly simplified
and improved regulations and procedure would be submitted to them
by means of which that movement would make accelerated progress.
He regretted that there had of late been a change in Western London
which was not for the benefit of that portion of the city. The workman
considered the West End to be his civic front parlour, but of late there
had been a tendency to convert residential houses into motor car
emporiums to the detriment of the neighbourhood and to the detriment
of the property itself twenty-five or fifty years hence. He also objected
to the fact that a power company could dump a power station at Chelsea
when it ought to be at Gravesend, and that a Hovis flour mill could be
put at the foot of Vauxhall bridge when it ought to have been at
Blackwall or the Isle of Dogs."