The usual answer to a question of this kind is that the poor are very extravagant. It is no answer. It does not fit the question. But what matter if only it saves people from thinking? Another answer sometimes given is that everything in districts where people are poor is cheaper, because the people are poor, than it would be in districts where people are rich. Now, is that so? If it were, it might in some degree help to solve the problem.
To take the item of rent:—a single room in Lambeth, 15 feet by 12 feet, upstairs, with two windows—a good room—costs a poor man 4s. a week. A house containing eighteen rooms in South Kensington, for rent, rates, and taxes, may cost a rich man £250 a year. If the rich man were to pay 4s. a week for every 20 square yards of his floor space, he would pay, not £250 a year, but £285. If he were to pay 4s. a week for the same amount of cubic space for which the Lambeth man is paying his 4s., he would pay, not £250 a year, but £500. Added to which he gets an elaborate system of water laid on (hot and cold), baths, waste pipes and sinks from top to bottom of the house. He also gets an amount of coal-cellarage which enables him to buy his coal cheap, and he gets good air and light and space round his house, so that he can keep his doctor’s bills down. He certainly has a better bargain for his £250 a year than the poor man has for his 4s. a week. Therefore it is not true to say that a family can be brought up on 20s. a week in Lambeth because a poor man can make a better bargain over his rent than can a rich man. As a matter of fact, we see that he actually pays more per cubic foot of space than the rich man does.
A comparison might be made in something like the following way:
| A middle-class well-to-do man with income of £2,000 | might pay in rent, rates, and taxes, £250— | a proportion of his income which is equal to one-eighth. |
| A middle-class comfortable man, with income of £500 | might pay in rent, rates, and taxes, £85— | a proportion of his income which is equal to about one-sixth. |
| A poor man with 24s. a week, or £62 8s. a year, | might pay in rent, rates, and taxes, 8s. a week, or £20 16s. a year— | a proportion of his income which is equal to one-third. |
If the man with £2,000 a year paid one-third of his income in rent, rates, and taxes, he would pay £666 a year, while the man with £500 a year would pay £166, and they would both be better able to afford these sums than the poor man is able to afford his £20 16s. Allowing that each of them has a wife and four children to maintain, there would at least be enough left in both families to give sufficient nourishment to every member. Fewer servants might be kept, there might be less travelling, plainer clothes, and less saving, but enough to eat there would be. But the poor man, having no expenditure other than food which can be cut down, is obliged, in order to pay one-third of his income in rent, to cut down food.
The chief item in every poor budget is rent, and on the whole and roughly speaking it is safe to say that a family with three or more children is likely to be spending between 7s. and 8s. a week on rent alone. Why do they spend so much when, as we see, it must mean cutting down such a primary necessary as food?
To find the answer to this question, an analysis was made of the conditions of thirty-one families with three or more children who happened to come within the scope of the investigation. The analysis took the form of a comparison of the death-rate in those families as related to the number of children in each, the household allowance of each, and the amount paid in rent by each. Household allowance was chosen rather than wage, as being necessarily in closer touch with household expenditure than is the actual wage, from which a varying amount of pocket-money for the man is generally taken.
Amount paid in rent was chosen rather than number of rooms, because low rent, though often meaning fewer rooms, may quite as likely mean basement rooms, or unusually small rooms, or rooms in a very old cottage below the level of an alley-way. One good upstairs room may cost as much as a couple of dark and damp basement rooms, and, though that one room may mean horrible overcrowding for a family of five or six persons, it may nevertheless be a wiser and healthier home than the two-roomed basement, where the overcrowding would nominally be less. As a matter of fact, owing to insufficient beds and bedding, the whole family would probably sleep in one of the two basement rooms, and therefore the air space at night would be no more adequate than in one room upstairs, while bronchitis and rheumatism would be added to the dangers of overcrowding.
The percentages given in the little table on p. 26 are calculated approximately to the nearest whole number below.