The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

But though the common scold and the ducking stool no longer figure in the quarter sessions calendar—though it would rest with the Court of Criminal Appeal to decide if they are yet entirely obsolete—the woman with a tongue, the “rixatrix,” or lady brawler is undoubtedly still existent and has to be dealt with by the landlord of small property by County Court eviction.

What is called a possession summons is taken out, and in the hearing of it the lady always appears and protests vigorously against the treatment meted out to her, arguing that the street is in a conspiracy against her, and that she is the one quiet peaceful woman in the neighbourhood. Any doubt as to the correctness of the judicial decision in making an eviction order is solved as soon as the order is made, when, self-restraint being no longer necessary, the full force of “the tongue” is turned upon the landlord, the judge who is in league with him, and the two stalwart members of the force who with some difficulty show the lady the door. Next to dry rot and vermin, a tenant with “a tongue” is the greatest enemy of the landlord of mean streets.

But what has long been recognised about the status of landlord and tenant, is that under present economic circumstances it is impossible for a wage-earner to obtain at the expenditure of a reasonable proportion of his income proper housing for himself and his wife and children. The duty of the State to the poor in this matter is gradually dawning on people’s minds, they are waking up to the fact that it cannot be done solely by individual effort, and on this subject the law, I am glad to report, is beginning to make serious efforts to set its houses in order.

At present legislation has taken upon itself three objects: (1) The clearing of slum areas and rebuilding new dwellings, with powers of compulsory purchase granted to local bodies. (2) The granting to corporations and councils power to close insanitary houses, and to make their owners repair them. (3) The permission to local authorities to build houses for the working classes where there is an insufficiency.

We are a slow moving race. We generally do our legislative reforms by a succession of statutes vigorously fought over and hacked about by gay party spirits whose nearest idea of patriotism is to queer the other fellow’s pitch and spoil his budding statute by crimping amendments that he knows will make it unworkable. We have only gone a little way with the Housing business as yet, and if the next statute on the matter could be put in the hands of a small committee of both parties to draft and bring before the House, perhaps we should get somewhat nearer finality.

It is rather melancholy reading to pick up the latest pamphlet of the bookstall on the Housing Question and find much of the writer’s ingenuity wasted in trying to prove that his party, and his only, has in the past made any effort to better the housing of the people, and that in the future there is only one honest capable scheme which is worthy of consideration. There is not much real help in these essays. Their burden is always the same. Recollect at the Election time—“Short’s very well as far as he goes, but the real friend is Codlin—not Short.”

The truth is that neither party has done very much. The history of the matter is much as follows: Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities. Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. This truth has not been taught us by the priests and politicians of our time, but by our men of letters.

Dickens knew all about it and prophesied in despair that we should have to wait for five hundred years for reform. You remember Tom-all-Alone’s where Jo lives: “It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who, after establishing their own possessions took to letting them out in lodgings. Now these tumbling tenements contain by night a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years—though born expressly to do it.”

Maybe you could not find to-day an exact replica of Tom-all-Alone’s; certainly we have swept away acres of them, but it is still worth while to read and remember such descriptions, if only to remind ourselves what the poor have to suffer if the law remains powerless and inert in the compulsory provision of decent housing. People grumble at State interference, but they forget what made it necessary. Rampant individualism led to housing workmen in the tailor’s shop, described by Alton Locke “a low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspirations, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of threads, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and smoke.”

When we are wondering how far it is our right and duty to interfere between a man and his house property or whether it is incumbent upon the nation to take upon itself the burden of housing its people, it is useful to look on these pictures of England in the glorious days of Queen Victoria and Albert the Great and Good. The problems were there then, but it was not the statesmen who saw them and urged their solution.