CHAPTER IV
OVERCROWDING, ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS
I have been at some pains to demonstrate the dangers and inconveniences which are inseparable from houses built, as are the majority of town houses, upon an area which is wholly insufficient when considered in relation to their cubic contents.
Feeling, as I do, that the question of space round the dwelling is of the greatest importance—so important that every other sanitary regulation sinks into insignificance when compared with it—I have endeavoured to show how detached houses may, to their great advantage, be independent of the public sewers, and equally independent, if their owner choose, of public water supplies; and this I have done in the hope that in country places, and places which are developing, the precious boon of living in a detached house may be recognised.
While I am not slow to admit that water under pressure is a great advantage if it be wisely used, I have pointed out persistently for some years that our present system of water-carried sewage gives a 'fatal facility' to the overcrowding of houses, and has made life, of a sort, physically possible under conditions of overcrowding which have never been equalled in the history of the world.
In China and the East generally, be it remembered, the large population lives upon one plane. It has been left to Europe and America to try the experiment of piling the city populations in heaps, of housing them in many-storeyed buildings, some of which (in America) are fifty times the height of a man.
The facilities for overcrowding which are afforded by big schemes of water-supply and sewerage are now well understood, and have caused the formation of 'Building Societies' throughout the country. A large number of these societies during the past few years have been proved to have been dishonestly managed, and have involved widespread financial disaster amongst the poor and thrifty.
The mode of proceeding of these societies is to buy up, on the outskirts of towns having a system of sewers and a common water-supply, plots of land abutting on roads which have been sewered at the expense of the ratepayers.
These plots are then sold to purchasers who pay 10 per cent. deposit for possession, and pay the rest of the purchase money in monthly or quarterly instalments for a term of years, 10 or 15, as the case may be, with 5 per cent. interest. Thus the artisan, having paid a most exorbitant price for a plot of ground, starts in life with a mortgage round his neck, and probably finds, should anything interfere with the regular payment of instalments, that he has a hard-faced usurer to deal with, who merely concealed his identity behind the title of 'Company, Limited.'