9} well-groomed team, while the fresh air fans
his face and the westering sun casts a mantle of loveliness around him.
He may be a lover of nature, this man. He may watch the coming of the
birds and the first white flashing of the swallows' wings. If he does
not own the land there is no reason why he should not 'own the
landscape.' At the close of the day he goes home and is met by the
welcoming shout of his children, who, strong and sturdy, clamber on his
knees.

But it was decreed that he be driven into a slum; and see what has been
made of him! Walk through the East End of Glasgow on a Saturday night
and mark the product of the 'highest civilisation' the world has ever
known. Out of reeking public-houses men and women reel into the
streets. Degradation and brutality have marked them for their own.
Their diseased bodies witness to their lives of sensuality. They were
children of the fresh air, now 133,000 of them in {80} Glasgow live in
one-room houses with the very decencies of life denied them; and
486,000 live in one-room and kitchen houses--a total population of
619,000, in the one city, doomed to live under conditions which render
all privacy impossible. Often a father and mother and three or four
children live in a single apartment. When that single apartment is at
the top of the rookery, the pitiful spectacle is seen of little
children with bowed or bent legs climbing painfully up the squalid
stairs. The mothers of the race can be seen toiling up weary flights
of stairs carrying a heavy basket on one arm and a child in the other.
Once streams of purest water from the hillsides flowed day and night,
singing to them, cleansing for them; now it is impossible to keep
clean, for in these rookeries the washhouse is only available once
every three weeks! Out of a million of a population, 60 per cent. live
under conditions such as these. The Medical Officer of Health (an
office that can be no {81} sinecure in such a city) has declared that
there are 10,000 houses in Glasgow absolutely unfit for human
habitation, and which it is impossible to make fit. But a doomed
population must go on living in them because there is no other
accommodation to be found for them. In these places the children
perish in the first year of life at a rate of 200 per thousand; but in
the West End only 50 children die per thousand. Out of every thousand
babies born in those parts of the city in which the poor are massed,
150 at