CHAPTER VI.

LOANS FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF Towns.

"Meanwhile, at social industry's command,

How quick, how vast an increase! From the germ

Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced,

Here a huge town, continuous and compact,

Hiding the face of earth for leagues; and there,
Where not a habitation stood before,

Abodes of men irregularly massed

Like trees in forests,-spread through spacious tracts,
O'er which the smoke of unremitting fires

Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths

Of vapour glittering in the morning sun."-WORDSWORTH.

A Town Life the future Life of England.

ONE of the governing facts in our social condition is, that all the increase of the population flows into the towns. For many years the rural population has not increased, and whatever may be done to favour the direction of labour to the land, it is not likely permanently to employ a greater number than at present. The great majority of the people of Great Britain already live in towns, and in towns it seems to be the destiny of succeeding multitudes to spend their existence. A town life, then, is already, for the most part, and in the future time will still more be, the life of the people of England. It is well that we should study the circumstances of that life, and see how far they are, or can be made, consistent with the highest ends for which man exists.

The general characteristic of a town life is crowding, or the collection of men in masses; and the first conspicuous effect of such aggregation is the peculiar stimulus which it gives to

all the powers of the mind. Whether it be for good or for evil, our whole life is rendered deeper and more intense by social intercourse. As "Iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." Indeed, so far as we know, society is a condition indispensable for the deliverance of man from the most torpid brutality, and therefore, in its highest forms of development, must approach nearest to that "natural state which imaginative writers, like Rousseau, suppose to have been left behind us in the primitive forests. It accords with this, that cities have played the chief part in the progress of civilization'. In the ancient world, Athens was the radiant centre of intellectual light, not for Greece only, but for the world. At a later period, the greatest moral influence known to man was first felt in the most crowded communities. Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome, not to speak of Jerusalem, was each in its turn a cradle of the Christian faith, and from each of those points of concentration the healing and regenerating spirit was carried abroad to all who could receive it. In modern times the same fact presents itself. Whatever noblest enterprise be undertaken, whether for freedom or philanthropy, for preaching the gospel to the heathen or for lifting that pall of ignorance which hangs with such gloom over the population at home, the cities in every case still form the basis of operations. There, if anywhere, the needful intelligence, energy, and self-sacrifice, are to be found. Amidst the life of towns, then, will be the great duties of the coming time; and whatever evils attend such life, our business is to look them fully in the face and struggle with them as best we may.

Evils of a Town Life.

But it is not to be denied that the evils are enormous. If towns give us the highest view of man's range of moral attainment, so do they open up the deepest abysses of human

See Dr. Vaughan's "Age of Great Cities."

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

1 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