with the people of all classes; you are better acquainted than any one else with their environmental conditions, and you will, I think, agree with me that of these the one most urgently in need of consideration at this moment is their housing. It would take many addresses to deal with the housing question in all its aspects. It is a large question. We have, on the one hand, men with half a dozen houses of palatial size, standing in broad demesnes, empty for the most part or thinly populated by a retinue of pampered domestics, and we have, on the other hand, half a dozen pinched families huddled into one mean hovel reeking with filthy effluvium. It is, of course, mainly with the hovel-dwellers that sanitary reformers are concerned, and these present difficulties which may well tax their energies for a long time to come. They are everywhere, for from all parts of the country come complaints of over-crowding in wretched dwellings. It is, of course, in the large towns where benevolent enterprise is moving that we hear most of these evils; but they are by no means confined to the great centers of population, in which, however, they are growing at a rate that can no longer be overlooked. Our town population is, as you know, swelling portentously at the expense of the country. Thirty years ago the population of England and Wales was equally divided between town and country, but now three fourths of it are town dwellers, while only one fourth remains on the land, and the cry of the town is 'still they come.' According to the last census, the persons enumerated in urban were to those in rural districts as 335 to 100, whereas ten years previously they were as 250 to 100. The increase in the proportion of the population in urban districts is due partly to the growth of these districts themselves through the absorption of areas which were previously rural, but in a far larger degree to the migration to the towns of country people, and, as the provision of housing accommodation in urban districts has by no means kept pace with their increase of population, overcrowding has thickened and slums have multiplied.
I need not describe to you the state of matters which has resulted—a state of matters in many places deplorable and repulsive. We have in London 300,000 persons living in families of two or more in one-roomed tenements in which privacy and decency are impossible, often without the smallest ray of sunshine summer or winter, with walls and floors in every stage of dirt and decay, with an atmosphere that is stifling and not seldom alive with vermin. Mr. Burns told us that not long ago in Glasgow, where the housing problem is being so vigorously grappled with, there were places where the floors of the houses were let out at a penny or twopence a place so that any one could lie down on his pennyworth, and all huddled together for warmth in a dense mass of struggling humanity till the morning came. "There were," he said, "two places where the only accommodation given was a cord
