dently of removable filth which may be about them) answer to the common conception of "nuisances"; such, for instance, as those underground and other dwelling's which permanently are almost entirely dark and unventilable: and dwellings which are in such constructional partnership with public privies, or other depositories of filth, that their very sources of ventilation are essentially offensive and injurious, and dwellings which have such relations to local drainage that they are habitually soaked into by water or sewage, and so forth. But beyond these instances where the dwelling would, I think, even now be deemed by common consent "unfit for human habitation," instances, varying in degree, are innumerable, where, in small closed courts, surrounded by high buildings, and approached by narrow and perhaps winding gangways, houses of the meanest sort stand, acre after acre of them, back to back, shut from all enjoyment of light and air, with nothing but privies and dustbins to look upon; and surely such can only be counted "fit for human habitation" while the standard of that humanity is low. Again, by "over-crowded" dwellings I mean those where dwellers are in such proportion to dwelling-space that no obtainable quantity of ventilation will keep the air of the dwelling-space free from hurtfully large accumulations of animal effluvium. ......[1] … And as a particular class of cases, in which both evils are combined to form one monstrous nuisance, I ought expressly to mention certain of the so-called "tenement-houses" of the poor; especially those large but ill-circumstanced houses, once perhaps wealthily inhabited, but now pauperised, and often without a span of courtyard either front or back, where in each house perhaps a dozen or more rooms are separately let to a dozen or more lodgers, and where in each house the entire number of occupants (which even in England may be little short of a hundred) will necessarily have the use of but a single staircase and of a privy which perhaps is placed in the cellar.'[2]
I think I have quoted sufficient to show how bad some of these places are. But it may be said that that report of Mr. Simon was written in 1865, and that we are now in the year 1874. Therefore I will ask the House to let me quote two reports made in 1874. The first is by Mr. Liddle, the
- ↑ The words omitted are—'cases where the dwelling-space at its best stinks more or less with decomposing human excretions, and where, at its worst, this filthy atmosphere may (and very often does) have working and spreading within it the taint of some contagious fever.'
- ↑ 8th Report of Medical Officer of Privy Council, 1865, p. 13.
