human standard, they cannot all
at once begin to live merely up to the standard of pigs. No writer
dare tell in our English tongue the consequences of evicting the
denizens of a genuine rookery for the purpose of substituting
improvements; and I know only one French writer who would be bold
enough to furnish cogent details to any civilised community. But, for
argument's sake, let me suppose that your "rooks" are transferred from
their nests to your model dwellings. I shall allow you to do all that
philanthropy can dictate; I shall grant you the utmost powers that a
government can bestow; and I shall give six months for your
experiment. What will be found at the end of that time? Alas, your
fine model dwellings will be in worse condition than the wigwam that
the Apache and his squaw inhabit! Let a colony of "rooks" take
possession of a sound, well-fitted building, and it will be found that
not even the most stringent daily visitation will prevent utter wreck
from being wrought. The pipes needed for all sanitary purposes will be
cut and sold; the handles of doors and the brass-work of taps will be
cut away; every scrap of wood-work available for fire-wood will be
stolen sooner or later, and the people will relapse steadily into a
state of filth and recklessness to be paralleled only among Australian
and North American aborigines. Which of the sentimentalists has ever
travelled to America with a few hundreds of Russian and Polish Jews,
Saxon peasants, and Irish peasants from the West? That is the only
experience capable of giving an idea of what happens when a
fairly-fitted house is handed over to the tender mercies of a
selection from the British "residuum." I shall be accused of talking
the language of despair. I have never done that. I should like to see
the time come when the poor may no more dwell in hovels like swine,
and when a poverty-stricken inhabitant of London may not be brought up
with ideas and habits coarser than those of a pig; I merely say that
shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. They
are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars
for the use of ferrets. I grant that the condition of many London
streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see
how the desolation is caused. Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been
at work everywhere. The cistern which should supply a building cannot
be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few