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such property, or to make, at the expense of the owner, such alterations or repairs as may be ordered by the sanitary officer, without being compelled to acquire it. In all such cases under any of the above Acts, the cost would of course fall on the owner. Mr. Chamberlain would go further, and would make it an offence punishable by a heavy fine as well as costs, to own property in a state unfit for human habitation, a precedent for which, to a limited extent, may certainly be found in the Public Health Act 1875. With regard therefore to the fitness of the house itself there is no difficulty in treating the owner as at all events primarily responsible to the fullest extent, and under the several Acts above named if fully and properly administered, there would seem to be no difficulty in effectually dealing with the mischief which they were intended to prevent. It is at present more a matter for administration than legislation.

But the difficulty does not rest here. Much of the mischief arises from the acts of the tenant, from his carelessness, from his ignorance, from his wilful neglect. Who is to be primarily responsible for the natural results of such carelessness, ignorance, or wilful neglect? Lord Grey would carry on the responsibility of the owner, and suggests that the principle of the law relating to London lodging-houses, as laid down by the Act of 1852 and the Public Health Act of 1875, should be extended to houses of the kind usually occupied by working men let by the week or month, that principle being that it makes the persons who let lodgings in their houses responsible for preventing them from being used in a manner injurious to health and decency, and for this purpose he would enact that the owners of all houses or rooms so let should be held responsible for their condition, and should be made liable to a fine for every room they had let, which should be proved to have been occupied in a manner prejudicial to health or decency, whether the evil arose from defects in the building (as to which, as I have already said, the law is at present clear), or from the overcrowding or neglect of cleanliness of the tenant; the immediate lessor to the actual occupier to be for this purpose considered as the owner. With every wish to enforce the duties of ownership upon the owner (and for the point in question, I am quite willing to take Lord Grey's definition of owner, that is to say, the immediate lessor to the actual occupant, of course with remedies over against other persons), I doubt much whether such a plan is really practically workable. Lord Grey seems to me not fully to have appreciated the character of the class of persons who in large parts of London are the occupiers of these miserable dwellings. The owners, says Lord Grey, under the proposed regulations would be driven to use the power they would possess over their tenants, to induce them to adopt better and more civilised habits. They would for their own interest have to take upon themselves the duty of unpaid sanitary officers, a duty which, as he puts it, they would be able to discharge with in

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comparably greater effect than persons acting under public authority. I cannot assent to this as a general proposition. The only ultimate power which the landlord possesses is eviction. According to Lord Grey's plan the sanitary authority is to see that the owner does his duty. If this body fails to do so, the authority of the police and of the magistrate is to be invoked, and owner and local authority are to be fined. This all points to evictions: if the occupiers be evicted, whither are they to go? Pass this law; the evictions will not be by ones and twos. There are thousands and tens of thousands of such occupiers. Many of them know no better. They want educating to their duties, even the commonest duties of social life. Eviction is a sorry way of beginning the education. You cannot do this wholesale, as will assuredly be done if the law be such as practically to compel owners, for their own protection, to have resort to it. Listen to Miss Octavia Hill, in answer to questions put to her when examined before the House of Commons Committee. Q.: Take -place; the population is of such a kind that you would not care to rehouse them?' A.: 'I should care very much indeed to rehouse them! Q.: You think they are improvable?' A.: 'I always believe in people being improvable. They will not be improvable without a good deal of moral force as well as improved dwellings. If you move the people they carry the seeds of evil away with them. They must be somewhere, and they want improved dwellings that they can inhabit, and they want care taken of them.' 'My people, when I go amongst them first, would destroy anything; they would kick out the doorpanels and burn the cupboard doors!' 'I do not believe that this difficulty will ever be met except by a good deal of volunteer work. Whether the large societies will enlist volunteers, or whether it will be done by private enterprise, I do not know; but I am certain you can hunt the poor about from place to place, rout them out of one place and drive them to another, but you will never reach the poor except through people who care about them and watch over them.' If all owners were like Miss Octavia Hill there would be little difficulty; but even taking the world as we find it, there are happily owners in large numbers who are glad to do all in their power to improve the condition of the occupiers of their premises. Encourage, interest, assist, urge on the owners as much as you like, but if you make them by law primarily liable for the acts of the tenants, you will find that such compulsion, with eviction as their only ultimate weapon, is placing too heavy a burden upon their shoulders. Such a case as the newly created premises in Booth Street is worth consideration, and is instructive. Blocks of buildings had been erected, three storeys high, containing 230 rooms for occupation, and occupied by 700 tenants. The space occupied by these buildings with their appurtenances was about 27,495 superficial feet; the water-supply, water-closets, sinks, wash-houses, and dust shoots, from which the house refuse was discharged into bins

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in the yard, were placed on each floor for the use and convenience of the tenants. The occupiers were of the lower order of foreigners, who appeared not to know the proper use of the conveniences which had been erected for their comfort, and they permitted all the closets, sinks, and dust-shoots to be constantly stopped up; from which offensive matter flowed into the rooms and passages below, thereby causing not only serious damage to the property but rendering the buildings unfit for human habitation. Here was a case where every modern appliance had been made use of, but through the ignorance or carelessness of the occupiers the place became a nuisance. If forced to extremes, as primarily responsible, the owner would probably have evicted the occupiers. He did better, he removed his modern appliances, made simpler arrangements, and let the occupiers stay. If the owner be really an accessory, or be privy to all or any of the mischief, by all means punish him. Do not, however, in other cases by making him primarily responsible, give the occupiers any idea that you are freeing them from such responsibility as properly rests with them; and if the sanitary authority, and afterwards the police, are after all ultimately to be called into play, they might just as well, in most cases, at all events, be made use of with greater effect earlier in the day. It is complained, writes Lord Grey, that the failure of the laws by which Parliament has already attempted to check the abuses which exist in this matter is at least partly due to the fact that many of the members of the boards to which, as sanitary authorities, the duty of enforcing the existing laws has been assigned, are themselves interested directly or indirectly in the worst of the houses occupied by the working classes, and that their duty in this matter is consequently very imperfectly performed. He adds, however, that he does not think that there is much evidence to support this allegation; and I feel bound to say, for the credit of these boards, that the evidence given before the Committee quite bears out this opinion. Many other reasons have been given why Mr. Torrens's Acts have not been more often put in force. Before action can be taken under them, the premises must be reported as unfit for human habitation, it is said they should have been dealt with before reaching that stage; some of the medical officers of health prefer proceeding under the Nuisance Removal or Sanitary Acts; some persons object to the surveyor being called in as he is, as this, they say, often tends to patching up of worthless property to no avail. Some say that under the original Act of 1868 it was hard to proceed against the owner without giving him compensation; others say, on the other hand, since the passing of the Amending Act of 1879 giving compensation, that no such compensation should be paid, or that if paid at all it should be paid by the whole metropolis and not by the district merely. Anything for an excuse. The authorities do not seem to have been sufficiently alive to the magnitude of the evils, and these valuable Acts have been practically in abeyance far too long

Since the Committee reported in 1882 the Act of 1868 has been further amended: the recommendation of the Committee that the local authority should have power to remove houses, though in themselves in good condition, when by doing so they could open up courts and alleys, and thus give the necessary light, air, and ventilation, sufficient to render such courts and alleys healthy, has been fully carried out, and the owners of such courts and alleys which are thus improved may be called upon to contribute to the expense of carrying out the improvements; and, again, if the local authority fail in its duty in carrying out the provisions of the Act, the powers of the Metropolitan Board of Works may be invoked by the guardians or others, to compel the local authority to take action-an appeal which I should think it would be impossible for that Board to resist. But though these valuable Acts have apparently produced so little fruit, few people know how much good has been effected in London under the Nuisance Removal and Sanitary Acts, and through the constant and persistent action of the medical officers of health, or what great benefit has accrued from Mr. Torrens's Acts themselves in those cases in which they have been properly applied. As to this second question :--Legislation seems unnecessary. What is required is more constant and more persistent administration of the existing laws by the local authorities, urged on, as they must be, by the several departments, who, in their turn, will require all the assistance that can be given by a wholesome public opinion.

As to the third question:—If the powers given by the Nuisance Removal Acts, the Sanitary Acts, the Public Health Acts, and Mr. Torrens's Acts had been fully and continuously enforced, we should probably not have had much to complain of now, so far as isolated houses and simple streets are concerned; but there were, and still are, localities in London of a different and more complex type, which it would have been impossible properly to deal with under one set of these Acts or another. The evidence of the medical officers of health before the House of Commons Committee is conclusive on this point. I refer to those cases of old parts of London-narrow lanes, courts, and alleys closely packed together-to which light and air are strangers-in the hands of many owners, where no one owner could improve, where it would have been folly to have insisted upon any one owner rebuilding, for the best-built house must still have been unsanitary from its evil surroundings; where it is necessary to make a clean sweep of everything by Act of Parliament, and get rid of all questions of lights and other easements, right of way, &c., and so re-arrange the whole area on proper sanitary principles. In such a case it is necessary for some local authority to step in and acquire the whole. It was to meet this state of things that my own Act of 1875 was passed. By this Act the local authority was to acquire the whole unsanitary area, re-arrange and re-sell, with ample powers to take additional houses (even though not unsanitary), if necessary, for the

scheme for sanitary purposes. Nothing short of this, I feel convinced, would be sufficient to clear away the old slums, the old rookeries, the old fever dens. When, however, these slums, the accumulation of centuries, have been cleared away, unless there be great neglect in the administration of the ordinary law, and new slums be allowed in consequence to grow up, this Act will have done its work. I discussed in these pages last year how it came to pass that, through the excessive sums paid as compensation, and for legal expenses connected with the schemes under the Act, the Metropolitan Board of Works felt compelled to stay their hands, and how the House of Commons Committee proposed to meet the difficulties which had arisen. By the Act of 1882, passed in consequence of the recommendation of the Committee, the legal expenses of such schemes have been greatly reduced. The obligation to provide for the rehousing of a number not less than the whole of the population disturbed, has practically been diminished by one half, so that now a large proportion of every area is at the disposal of the Board for commercial purposes, and the compensation to be paid is now by the Amending Acts of 1879 and 1882 placed upon its proper footing. One word as to this question of compensation. It is clear that the owner, if in default, should not gain advantage by his own wrong, nor should he be entitled to any compensation from the mere fact of his property being bought under a scheme, other or greater than that to which he would have been entitled if his property had been dealt with separately under the general sanitary law, The 10 per cent. usually given on compulsory purchase of lands was expressly taken away from unsanitary property by the Act of 1875. The words of that Act, referring to the 'nature and then condition of the property,' to the probable duration of the buildings in their existing state,' and to the state of repair thereof,' were intended as a rule for the arbitrator as to how he should deal with property which was in fact a nuisance, or which was approaching such a condition ; but the words following, that 'due regard was to be paid to all the circumstances of the case,' which were inserted at the instance of the late Mr. Cawley, then M.P. for Salford, have unfortunately caused much of the mischief that has arisen in the matter of excessive compensation. The Act of 1879 did much to remove this evil. Under its provisions, if the arbitrator was satisfied that any premises, by means of their unhealthy state or of overcrowding or otherwise, were in such a state or condition as to have been a nuisance within the meaning of the general law, he was bound to determine what would have been their value supposing the nuisance to have been abated, and what would have been the expense of abating the nuisance; and the only compensation to be paid was to be their estimated value after the nuisance had been abated, and after deducting the estimated expense of abating the nuisance

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