e
thing will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot.
He therefore, runs up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and
soon has all the poor people bundled into their little brick cells,
which are certainly better than their old quarters, in so far as they
are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied with clean water. But
Gudge has a more delicate nature. He feels a nameless something lacking
in the little brick boxes; he raises numberless objections; he even
assails the celebrated Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and
by the end of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the
people were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve
in both places precisely the same air of dazed amiability, it is very
difficult to find out which is right. But at least one might safely say
that no people ever liked stench or starvation as such, but only some
peculiar pleasures en tangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive
Gudge. Long before the final quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge
has succeeded in persuading himself that slums and stinks are really
very nice things; that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is
what has made our England great; and that the smell of open drains is
absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.

But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear
there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up
as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more
and more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed
of defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens
or infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him,
merely because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the
aid of eager little books by Socialists, that man is really happier in
a hive than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping total
strangers out of your bedroom he describes as Brotherhood; and the
necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare
say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is
this: that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more
indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as
divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge
is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if
you mention poverty t