Page:Lectures on Housing.djvu/76

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64
SOME ASPECTS OF THE HOUSING PROBLEM

produced in a great number of different places and sold through a great number of different shops. This circumstance—to say nothing of the difficulty of distinguishing between articles consumed in the main by the poor and by the rich,—seems to raise an almost insuperable obstacle to the grant of State aid in respect of poor people's purchases of such things. Education, on the other hand, is provided through a much smaller number of separate centres and is, furthermore, a commodity that can be furnished much more satisfactorily than food and clothing by public, as distinguished from private, enterprise. The administrative problem of organizing a bounty in respect of it is, therefore, considerably less complex. The case of insurance, though somewhat harder than that of education, is still much easier than that of food and clothing. The housing of the poor stands, as it seems to me, in an intermediate position. There are strong grounds for holding that the task of building houses is not generally one