en, whom they are utterly incompetent to train as
rational or domestic beings. The home is no home, but a mere lodging,
and often a very comfortless one.

We speak not merely of the poorest labourers, but of the best-paid
workmen in the large manufacturing towns. Men earning from two to three
pounds a week,--or more than the average pay of curates and bankers'
clerks,--though spending considerable amounts on beer, will often grudge
so small a part of their income as half-a-crown a week to provide decent
homes for themselves and their children. What is the consequence? They
degrade themselves and their families. They crowd together, in foul
neighbourhoods, into dwellings possessing no element of health or
decency; where even the small rental which they pay is in excess of the
accommodation they receive. The results are inevitable,--loss of
self-respect, degradation of intelligence, failure of physical health,
and premature death. Even the highest-minded philosopher, placed in such
a situation, would gradually gravitate towards brutality.

But the amount thus saved, or rather not expended on house-rent, is not
economy; it is reckless waste. The sickness caused by the bad dwelling
involves frequent interruptions of work, and drains upon the Savings
Bank or the Benefit Society; and a final and rapid descent to the
poor-rates. Though the loss to the middle and upper classes is great,
the loss is not for a moment to be compared with that which falls upon
the working classes themselves, through their neglect in providing
wholesome and comfortable dwellings for their families. It is, perhaps,
not saying too much to aver, that one-half the money expended by benefit
societies in large towns, may be set down as pecuniary loss arising from
bad and unhealthy homes.

But there is a worse consequence still. The low tone of physical health
thereby produced is one of the chief causes of drunkenness. Mr. Chadwick
once remonstrated with an apparently sensible workman on the expenditure
of half his income on whisky. His reply was, "Do you, sir, come and live
here, and you will drink whisky too." Mr. Leigh says, "I would not be
understood that habits of intoxication are _wholly_ due to a defective
sanitary condition; but no person can have the experience I have had
without coming to the conclusion that _unhealthy_ and unhappy
homes,--loss of _vital_ and consequently of _industrial_ energy, and a
consciousness of inability to control exter