“I wish particularly,” Dr. S. Smith states, “to draw attention to the importance of having a certain number of rooms in the dwelling-houses of the poor, though I am aware of the difficulty of legislating on this matter, and of the still greater difficulty of carrying out practically what the legislature may declare to be its intention and will. Still it is right, that the attention of the legislature and other public bodies should be called to the physical deterioration and moral degradation, which results from the want of proper room in the dwelling-houses of the poor. Besides the evidence on this subject, which has been published in the report on the sanitary condition of the laboring population, a large mass of evidence to the same effect will be found in the reports of the sub-commissioners under the Children’s Employment Commission, and in the statements of a great number of witnesses examined by them. Instances such as the following are given: ‘A mother and her son, being an adult, sleep in the same bed. Grown-up females and unmarried young men sleep in the same room. A man, his wife, and his wife’s sister, the latter being an adult, sleep together in the same bed.’ I have myself seen, a young man, twenty years of age, sleeping in the same bed with his sister, a young woman, sixteen or seventeen years old. That incestuous intercourse takes place under these circumstances, there is too much reason to believe; and that when unmarried young men and women sleep together in the same room, the women become common to the men, is stated as a positive fact; but I regard another inevitable effect of this state of things as no less pernicious; it is one of the instances which, for want of a better term, may be called unhumanizing, because it tends to weaken and destroy the feelings and affections which are distinctive of the human being, and which raise him above the level of the brute. I have sometimes checked myself in the wish, that men of high station and authority, would visit these abodes of the less fortunate fellow-creatures, and witness with their own eyes the scenes presented there; for I have thought the same end might be answered in a way less disagreeable to them. They have only to visit the Zoological Gardens, and observe the state of society in that large room, which is appropriated to a particular class of animals, where every want is relieved, and every appetite and passion gratified, in full view of the whole community. In the filthy and crowded streets, in our large towns and cities, you see human faces retrograding, sinking down to the level of those brute tribes; and you find manners appropriate to the degradation. Can any one wonder that there is among these classes of the people so little intelligence—so slight an approach to humanity—so total an absence of domestic affection, and of moral and religious feeling? The experiment has been long tried on a large scale with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration, that if, from early infancy, you allow human beings to live like brutes, you can degrade them down to their level, leaving to them scarcely more intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human minds and hearts.”
Dr. Lyon Playfair adduces instances of the crowding of persons in the same room, without even the plea of necessity. They are not, he informs us, the most extreme cases of the kind.[3]
In Preston, out of 442 dwellings examined in unhealthy localities, and inhabited at the time of the inquiry by 2400 persons sleeping in 852 beds, it appeared that
| In | 84 | cases | 4 | persons slept | in the | same bed, |
| In | 28 | “ | 5 | “ | “ | “ |
| In | 13 | “ | 6 | “ | “ | “ |
| In | 3 | “ | 7 | “ | “ | “ |
| In | 1 | “ | 8 | “ | “ | “ |
“Amidst the dirt and disease of filthy back courts and alleys, vices and crimes are lurking,” says the Rev. Mr. Clay, “altogether unimagined by those who have never visited such abodes.” The inspectors of prisons in Scotland, from separate inquiries, have also come to the conclusion, that the physical causes of disease, indirectly become the causes of crime.
Public Lodging Houses, are another prolific source of disease and vice. They are, in nearly all large cities, the nightly resorts not only of the migrating laborer, and travelling artisan, but, also, of the lower mendicants, thieves, and prostitutes. These resorts are well known to the criminal police. In 1831, Mr. James knew a house of this description in London, to contain 126 persons, many of them women and children, and perhaps not more than a dozen beds in the place. At the census of 1841, there were not more than 30 to 40 in any of these houses; “still these numbers crowd the houses most annoyingly.” It is no uncommon thing, as we learn from Dr. Duncan, (Report on the Sanatory State of Liverpool,) for the keepers of lodging houses to cover the floor with straw, and allow as many human beings as can manage to pack themselves together, to take up their quarters for the night, at the charge of a penny each. The havoc made by the cholera in the lodging houses at Manchester, in 1832, was terrible. In some of these houses, as many as 6 or 8 beds were contained in a single room, which are crowded promiscuously with men, women, and children. Dr. Howard, after showing the lamentable extent to which they become the hot-beds of febrile diseases of the most violent and fatal character, owing mainly to their filthy and unventilated condition, thus describes the morals of their frequenters, and their malign influence in this way on the young and inexperienced. “They serve as open receptacles of crime, vice, and profligacy, and as nurseries in which the young and yet uninitiated, become familiar with every species of immorality. They are the haunts of the most depraved and abandoned characters, as well as the most miserable and suffering objects of the town, (Manchester,) and constitute one of the most influential causes of the physical and moral degradation of our laboring population.”
Unless we are misinformed, the investigations now making by the Board of Health of Philadelphia, will reveal a state of things, not much behind, although on a smaller scale, those described in the foregoing extracts; and as regards New York, Dr. Griscom’s report, made a few years ago, exhibits a still darker picture. With the warnings on the other side of the Atlantic to deter us, we ought to have kept clear of these nuisances entirely. Let us, as we have imitated the people of Great Britain for evil, imitate them also for good, by instituting the same searching inquiries into the nature and extent of these physical and moral corruptions, that are recorded in the proceedings of the various Parliamentary committees and Royal Commissioners.
In Glasgow, the lodging houses have been subjected to regular municipal supervision and ordinance, and, as we are told, with excellent effects.
