III
When we look beneath the surface and ask the reasons why the poor cannot find houses in which they can live with comfort, we discover that it is a matter of finance. The extortionate prices of building sites render it impossible to build on them any dwelling-houses except tenements. Here is an example: 'Unless the land were given you, you could not possibly build cottages,' says the Secretary of the Guinness Trust. 'Our new site, which was supposed to be sold to us on cheap terms, cost £11,000 an acre, so that you can see the landrent per tenement will work out at about 2s. 6d. a week, and as I say, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners professed to sell to us at a low rate, having regard to our objects. It is really not a stiff price for the position.' In this bare statement we touch bedrock. The Guinness Trust, founded with the philanthropic purpose of providing decent housing for the poor, buys an acre for building purposes from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who, from their very name, must be interested in the poor, and they get it cheap at £11,000 an acre! What does it mean this fabulous cost of land in great cities? A hundred years ago that acre would be bought and sold at its agricultural value of a few score pounds sterling. Whence, then, this inflated price? The answer is that the people created that value. We deprived them of the land of England and drove them to the cities. In the cities they, by their labour, made the land valuable; and the value which they themselves created we turn against them. We exiled the people from the soil; and in the cities, where we piled them, we turned the values, which they created, into an instrument for their ultimate destruction. They have made the land so valuable that cottages can no longer be built on it, and the man with four children searches in vain for a house. It is a staggering product of a perfect civilisation. And still more staggering when one realises that the birthrate of these poor people, for whom the Guinness Trust provides some measure of comfort, is 36.95 per thousand, as compared to 17.53 in the west. The section of the population still willing to carry on the race must pay £11,000 an acre for the sites of their teeming tenements. Only after that form can civilisation make room for the child.
IV
What guerdon has the State provided for the massed populations who have the very riches they create thus turned into an instrument for their impoverishment? One looks for that guerdon in vain. The vast majority of them are consigned to a life of privation from birth to death. Factories pour heavenward the smoke which lies over our cities as a pall, and in the gloom men and women toil with bloodless faces producing the goods which, elaborate and costly, or cheap and nasty, crowd the markets of all the world. But ten millions of the toilers go shivering through life ever tottering on the verge of the precipice of want. Over one and a half millions of them were rated as paupers in the years before the war. In the old Roman world half the population were slaves, but three-fourths of our population are virtually slaves. For the man who marries and has children, who is forced into a slum, and is once chained to the chariot of modern machinery, there is no escape. 'Man is born free,' declared Rousseau, 'and is everywhere in chains.' No chains of slavery were ever more degrading than those forged in our day. Systems of indoor sweating found for their antidote the pauper system of outdoor relief. England, that struck the shackles off the African slaves, forged shackles for her own children. The conditions of the modern slaves are in a sense worse than that of the Roman serf. For the Roman slaves often laboured in noble toil, building temples which have defied the corroding power of time and which still inspire the heart with admiration and awe. But these slaves of to-day build nothing that endures. The cities of their labour might perish to-morrow, but in their perishing no beauty would disappear from the earth. The very efforts which the toilers have made to improve their state have been movements of blindness and folly. They have organised far-reaching systems by which they seek through the limitation of output to improve their condition. The gate through which they press towards deliverance is the gate of dishonesty. That is the proof of the servitude not of body only, but of mind and spirit, to which they have been brought. 'I do not hesitate to express the opinion,' wrote Huxley in 1890, that if there is no hope of a large improvement in the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over nature which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of want with its concomitant physical and moral degradation amongst the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole thing away as a desirable consummation.' Since then, wealth has enormously increased, science has triumphed more and more over nature, but the increase of the one and the triumph of the other have only produced an increase of physical and moral degradation on the part of masses of the people. Whoever ponders the two Reports in which for the first time that degeneration is fearlessly and mercilessly exposed, cannot any longer be blind to that. It is not, however, by means of a 'kindly comet' that the arrest comes. For God's judgments shut not the door against hope.
V
In the days of old a prophet surveying the decay of Israel used a phrase which grips the heart: 'They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity,'[[4]] and so has visualised our pitiful state also. It is not, however, quite the same. For Zion was the temple, and stood for the hunger of the soul. We no longer build any temples. We build factories and playhouses and endless miles of grey and colourless streets. To-day the prophet would vary the words, 'They build up theatres and cinemas with blood and London with iniquity.' That is near the truth. London has been built up by that iniquity which has made the home-counties of England waste; and the life-blood of islands and fair valleys and hill-sheltered glens has been drained that Glasgow might grow and its slums be enlarged. The call to repentance which comes to our ears is a call summoning us to right the wrong wrought by blinded politicians, to restore again to the people the decencies of life and the possibilities of happiness. The call to national repentance is not a call to emotion but a call to action. Of old prophets summoned a race fast hurrying to decay to return to God. The way of return was the way of action. They were exhorted to people the waste places, to curb licentiousness, and to walk in the path of righteousness. And to-day the call of national repentance is the same. It is the call to the realisation of an ideal of life in which masses of the people will not be damned from birth by a social organism in whose grip they are powerless. All in vain does a mission, appealing to the soul, feeble of help, wage conflict in a slum with the forces of the State, wielded through a dozen public-houses, that depress and enslave. As things now are there can be no escape and no salvation for the man in the slum.
[[1]] Dr. Chalmers has pointed out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1913, vol. vi., that the mortality of infants varied inversely with the number of rooms occupied up to four.
Infant mortality in one-apartment houses, per thousand, 210
" " two " " " 164
" " three " " " 129
" " four " " " 103
[[2]] The following quotation from a newspaper of this summer is illuminating:—