ousands in houses reasonably well built, but for the
most part ill designed and unpleasant to the eye, houses passably
sanitary and convenient, fitted with bathrooms, with properly equipped
kitchens, usually with a certain space of air and garden about them.
And the rest of our millions he would find crowded into houses
evidently too small for a decent life, and often dreadfully dirty and
insanitary, without proper space or appliances to cook properly, wash
properly or indeed perform any of the fundamental operations of a
civilized life tolerably well--without, indeed, even the privacy
needed for common decency. In the towns he would find most of the
houses occupied by people for whose needs they were obviously not
designed, and in many cases extraordinarily crowded, ramshackle and
unclean; in the country he would be amazed to find still denser
congestion, sometimes a dozen people in one miserable, tumble-down,
outwardly picturesque and inwardly abominable two-roomed cottage,
people living up against pigsties and drawing water from wells they
could not help but contaminate. Think of how the intimate glimpses
from the railway train one gets into people's homes upon the outskirts
of any of our large towns would impress him. And being, as we assume,
clear minded and able to trace cause and effect, he would see all this
disorder working out in mortality, disease, misery and intellectual
and moral failure.

All this would strike our visitor as a very remarkable state of
affairs for reasonable creatures to endure, and probably he would not
understand at first that millions of people were content to regard all
this disorder as the permanent lot of humanity. He would assume that
this must be a temporary state of affairs due to some causes unknown
to him, some great migration, for example. He would suppose we were
all busy putting things right. He would see on the one hand unemployed
labour and unemployed material; on the other, great areas of suitable
land and the crying need for more and better homes than the people
had, and it would seem the most natural thing in the world that the
directing intelligence of the community should set the unemployed
people to work with the unemployed material upon the land to house the
whole population fairly and well. There exists all that is needed to
house the whole population admirably, the building material, the room,
the unoccupied hands. Why is it not being done?

Our answer would be, o