may possess. The markets they open up stimulate improvements in agricultural methods, and the industries and commerce they establish conduce to good government and individual liberty. They are the nurseries of the arts and sciences, and as to the evils attending them, on which I have been enlarging, they are not all inherent in their very nature, but are largely accidental concomitants of their mode of growth and the offspring of the ignorance and stupidity of their inhabitants. Many of these are in process of mitigation and I dare say it occurs to you that if you had a free hand in demolishing and reconstructing one of our great cities with, say, the cost of the South African war at your disposal, you could free it from much of the opprobrium in relation to sanitary matters that has hitherto attached to it. But such wholesale remodeling is scarcely practicable, and even were it accomplished, the city would still probably fall short of the country standard of health, even if that standard remained where it is at present and were not raised like that of the city. For as things now are, the country is in many parts guilty of sanitary offences as heinous as those of the towns, and is only saved from their consequences in an equal ratio by the wider elbow-room it affords, and the fresh air and unpolluted sunshine it enjoys by nature's bounty. The last royal commission that reported on rural housings described the conditions under which many agricultural laborers live as 'physically and morally unwholesome and offensive.' A London association that in 1897 conducted a systematic inquiry into the state of 240 country villages with 10,000 dwellings declared that in one half of these villages the cottages were bad, and that in some thirty villages there were cases of gross overcrowding. Mr. Walter Crotch has stated that the result of his own very extensive and searching investigation had been "the discovery of whole villages without a drop of water from end to end; of cottages without even the ordinary conveniences which the law of common decency demands, and of poor people having their homes let while they lay quivering in the throes of death." "Week by week," he goes on, "the most shocking cases of overcrowding are reported in the newspapers, and there can be no doubt that this huddling together of people of both sexes and of all ages in the same room is a source of frightful immorality."
Mr. Clement Edwards said in 1900 that many of the inhabited cottages in the south and west of England were in a hopelessly dilapidated condition with gaping walls and rotting roofs, and were, moreover, terribly overcrowded. Some of the facts he reported were positively revolting in themselves and much worse in their suggestions of inevitable social and moral results. As to sanitation it was non-existent. Miss Constance Cochrane, of the Sanitary Institute, quotes a case in Cambridgeshire, in which eleven members of one family were all sleeping in one room owing to the scarcity of cottages in the village. Private
