degradation. There is no reason to suppose that the intensity of moral evil in cities is less than it ever was, although the limits and influence of practical Christianity may be continually widening. Evil can and does acquire concentrated strength as well as Good. In modern times there have been very great external changes, the work of the scavenger, the painter, and the policeman, by which evil has been not so much removed as placed out of sight. We have not only whitened the sepulchre, but encrusted it with marble, and not a few ostentatious inscriptions; but it still contains the rottenness and the dead men's bones.

Two sets of circumstances produce the evils of towns; those which may be called moral, and those which are physical. Crowding developes not only the intellect, but the passions, so as to render vice, where it exists, early, contagious, and malignant, and therefore to demand moral correctives of proportionate force; but into this all-important subject the purpose in hand does not lead us. It requires only a reference to certain physical causes, which are continually operating upon the health, and through the health upon the morals, of all who live in towns. The majority of those persons who subsist, whether as artizans or as labourers, by the receipt of wages, are in many respects more favourably placed for the highest ends of life than that uneasy, struggling, shop-keeping class, which seems so much above them. They are free to live far less in show and more in reality. They are in constant contact with those rough stubborn facts of nature which, under their hands, are continually becoming smooth, and orderly, and beautiful. The work which they produce, or the services which they render, may be for a class too languidly luxurious to appreciate their worth; but the honest toil is not the less moral and bracing. The poor weaver, in the midst of his privations, sees the rich velvet spread out beneath his hands, not without a feeling of pride. The mason, the bricklayer, the carpenter, must have similar thoughts when, on the one leisure evening, they stroll through those long lines of sumptuous palaces which are the

creations of their industry. These and all other obscure workers, whose lives are not spent in the receipt and computation of money, but in tough obstinate conflict with difficulties, can never be forsaken by that sense of dignity and self-respect which are part of Nature's wages for all real toil. The existence of such men in all cases might, and in some cases does, exemplify that ideal of " plain living and high thinking" which the poet could only see in the past. We have it amongst us, though the cases are few; science and poetry and thought making noble and beautiful this common working life.

Healthy Habitations wanted.

But for any high attainments amongst the working class as a whole, some physical conditions are essential. These are included under the single head of healthy habitations. To give even a chance of making town life what it should be, it is needful that the dwellings should be clean-freed from the neighbourhood of all noxious deposits-well supplied with water-and sufficiently spacious and divided to allow of that privacy and decency which are essential to the growth of the domestic virtues. The labours of many admirable men' have brought us to a point at which we can say with confidence, first, that for the vast majority of the labouring population these conditions of a healthy moral life do not at present exist, and, secondly, that we have ample means at our disposal to create them.

It is not necessary to go into evidence with which the public is familiar of the necessity and practicability of drainage, water supply, and improved dwellings. These things may now be taken for granted. The crowding of men together generates physical poisons, far more destructive to life than the bloodiest wars, and yet such is the beautiful harmony of nature, that the

'Let me name, above all others, Dr. Southwood Smith, who many years ago had gone to the depths of this great sanitary question, and from whom in 1839 I first learned its immense import.

noxious deposits from which those poisons chiefly spring, if carried away to the country, would restore to the soil the richness and fertility which the food of the great towns withdraws from it. The obstacles to the establishment of this harmonious relation between town and country, and of all other conditions conducive to the welfare of crowded populations, are mainly financial, and to these the following remarks shall be confined.

Loans for Town Drainage and Water Supply.

Measures for the improvement of towns are of two classes: first, such as it is generally admitted must be carried out by some sort of corporate or collective authority; and secondly, those which are considered attainable either by private philanthropy, or through the enlightened self-interest of capitalists leading to industrial enterprises. Of the former kind are drainage, water supply, and the formation of town parks, and of the latter the erection of improved dwellings, with the auxiliary institutions of baths and wash-houses.

Drainage and water supply, so far as they involve any new work, are operations of that kind in which disposable capital is converted into income, and by which, therefore, the balance between the two, when it inclines to excess on the side of capital, may be most easily restored. Here then, upon the principles already laid down, is another mode in which the credit of the State might be used to give a beneficial direction to our present dangerous accumulation of capital. In drainage and water supply capital must be sunk, as in railways; but a full return might be obtained through rates, which would be in no way burthensome, if, like the agricultural drainage repayments, they were spread over a sufficient number of years. There would be no difficulty in effecting this through the central Government, which might borrow at the lowest interest, and would have it in its own power to make the security on which it might lend satisfactory. Without the intervention of the Government, the money, if it could be had at all, would be

obtained at a higher cost, and still greater difficulties would be experienced in settling the only method of repayment which does not involve hardship, nor give temptation to waste, namely, that of equal annual instalments. The operation as a whole would involve no loss. An eminently beneficial direction would be given to capital, which if not applied wisely will certainly be applied unwisely. A silent unostentatious benefit would be conferred on the great body of the working class. The periodical saturnalia of speculation might for once be passed

over.

Loans for Improvement of Dwellings.

The formation of town parks may, perhaps, be included with drainage and water supply as a proper object for Government loans and corporate enterprise; but the proposition to extend the same principle to the erection of a superior class of dwellings for the working population will encounter the most stern opposition. Laissez-faire, smarting in its den under the pain of recent wounds, a little humiliated, and not a little savage, will growl and snarl, and grind its teeth at such stark-naked socialism. Nevertheless, the danger must be faced. The peril of our situation is deadly and imminent. Those who think they see any way of lessening it, must expect wo and selfcondemnation, if they are deterred by the fear of personal consequences from giving the thought utterance.

It appears to me, then, that upon the principle and with the conditions already explained, loans might also be made by the Government to corporate bodies, for the erection of improved dwellings for the working classes.

It is sufficiently well known, that some dwellings of a superior order have been already erected by voluntary societies, and the immediate objects of those erections have been successfully secured. Clean, airy, and wholesome habitations have been provided for a certain number of persons, at an expense not

greater than what they paid for the close and fetid rooms in which they previously resided. The benefit is very highly appreciated by those who enjoy it. But it was never imagined by the originators of this plan, that they could do more than make a beginning of the great change which they saw to be so desirable. They hoped to be able to show, that those dwellings would furnish such a return to the capital invested in them, as would draw the all-powerful current of private enterprise into the same channel. There has been great and most valuable success, but there has not been this crowning triumph, and the difficulties in the way of reaching such a point are greater than were fully appreciated at the outset of the enterprise. In the first place, it was not to be expected that the most economical mode of erection would be hit upon, either in an experimental essay, or by a society of philanthropists. Steamengines failed before they succeeded, and commercial history is full of losses which pave the way to the most profitable investThe societies for erecting improved dwellings have not yet been able to show a practical result which would set private enterprise in motion. The capitalists upon whom they could expect to act are not so much the owners of the unemployed fund in the money market, as one particular class, namely, builders, with whom it happens, as it does in other branches of industry, that the greater part of their own new capital is the product of their own gains. Building capitalists choose not an investment which will barely pay, but that which will pay best, and of two modes in which the returns may be nearly equal, that is the least attractive in which repayments come in the form of weekly rents. All these causes conspire to form a thick hedge of obstacles between the capital of the private builder and that mode of application which would be most beneficial to the labouring class. Those who do build for that class go on in the beaten track, erecting, in many cases, what speedily become foul and pestilential dens, yet with impunity and with profit; for custom gives a colour of propriety to every exercise

ments.