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187
their work, as well as by their remarkable recommendations, designed
to mitigate the evil, especially by the provision of sites for the
erection of tenement dwellings. Should these recommendations
be earned into effect, it is to be feared that they will only very
partially, and locally, supply the want, and it will be necessary to
secure to the right persons—labourers, general dealers, widows
with families, etc., of the lowest and most necessitous classes—
the use of the new buildings, to the exclusion of clerks, artizans, &c.,
who now fill the Peabody and similar model dwellings, the rents
for which place them out of the reach of the very poor.
The drink question is discussed in its bearings on the main
question, Intemperance being characterised as at once the cause
and the consequence of overcrowding. "Drink and poverty act
and re-act upon each other." It is but too true that drink often
runs away with the money that might otherwise be available to
procure the luxury of a second room. "Want of thrift" is a
marked failing among the poor, many of whom might get better
lodgings if they were more economical in their expenditure. But
work is uncertain and "wages are low and precarious." "Dirt," a
natural consequence of overcrowding, is rightly described as "an
evil almost as condixcive to social misery as drinking and other
self-indulgences." "The poor are not cleanly in their habits,"
whether regard be had to the state of their homes or of their persons.
Among other sanitary defects described as co-existing with
over-crowding, reference is made to deficient water supply and
water-closet accommodation, in tenement houses "which, as a
rule, were originally constructed for a single family." The watercloset
accommodation is stated to be "most defective in spite of
the extensive powers confided to Local Authorities by the law in
this respect." It may be doubted whether the "powers" are not
over estimated, but, be this as it may, the statement does not
admit of general application, and it was made probably without
full knowledge of the efforts of sanitary officials to improve the
accommodation. Defects in the condition of the water-closets,
moreover, are largely the result of the destructive and uncleanly
habits of certain classes to which the Commissioners refer (p. 16).