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56
THE "SWEATER" AND THE "SLUM LANDLORD."
The two greatest evils of our present day social system are the
Slum Landlord and the Sweater; and it is, to put it mildly, an
anomaly that they should be allowed to discount the good results so
laboriously achieved by our public health machinery. Nothing is more
discouraging to the Sanitarian who is desirous of seeing, as the outcome
of his labours, a betterment in the hygienic conditions of the
very poor, than to witness the sapping of the physical well-being of a
large section of the community by these two social evils. And this
wastage of human lives and human physique goes on as if we were
careless and profligate of both, whereas costly measures of public
health policy continue to be directed towards other less fruitful ends.
We delay to take the action which will limit the rapacity of the Slum
Landlord and prevent him from fattening on the helplessness of those
who occupy his highly tenemented dwellings; he is free to exact a
rent which is quite out of proportion to the accommodation offeTed,
and which often amounts, in my experience, to one-third of the
tenants' total earnings, and leaves the toilers unable to provide the
necessary accommodation for decent and healthy living; and an expensive
public health machinery is largely concerned in abortive attempts to
reduce the resulting evils! Again, we spend a very large proportion of
our time in providing what are relatively luxuries in sanitary details in
homes in which, under the sweating system, the hours of labour and
the wage earned are such that the lives of those who occupy them
must necessarily offend against every law of hygiene; and the Nemesis
of physical deterioration, sickness and death in some parts of our
great cities is appalling.
During the year an Exhibition of Sweated Industries was held in
London, under the auspices of the "Daily News," at which the home
life and condition of labour of thousands of Londoners were laid bare
to those who cared to know of them; and it must have evoked
sentiments of pain and shame to every visitor. So long as pauper
aliens are allowed to settle upon our shores in unrestricted numbers
it is not difficult to see that a large proportion of them (and, as a