the habitations of the poor labourer—Epsom, for example. Of Godstone it is said, "We have many cottages unfit for human habitation; they are small and crowded, without ventilation or drainage, outhouses, gardens, or water supply." At Farnham the Commissioner saw a cottage in which a man and his wife and ten children lived. The whole family slept in one room, divided by a wooden screen, carried partially across. There was only one window to supply light and air to the whole room on both sides of the screen.
From the neighbourhood of Maidstone, in Kent, we get evidence similar in character to that concerning Norfolk. "Cottage accommodation is generally miserable, especially as to bedrooms; no decency can be observed. The sitting-rooms are too often stone or brick floored—draughty, cold, wretched places, from which the father and grown-up sons are only too glad to escape to the warm public-house near. The sanitary arrangements are horrible, and, in short, the cottages of the working man are so curiously contrived as to sap the foundations of morality, religion, and health."
In East Kent it is said many of the cottages are quite uninhabitable. What, then, must be the misery of the Cottage Homes of England, when, in the face of such evidence, the Commissioner says, "and yet it appeared to me that they were better in Kent than in any county I have visited"?
When in these reports we continually read such remarks as: "Our cottages are better now," "There is not much to complain of now," and find the whole matter spoken of as "the evil growth of many generations," we become conscious of a continuity of misery, under which generation after generation has dragged out a painful existence. Forty years ago, travelling through Leicestershire, William Cobbett thus described the homes of the peasantry: "Look at these hovels made of mud and of straw; bits of glass, or of old cast-off windows, without frames or hinges frequently, but merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them, and look at the bits of chairs or stools; the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table; the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare ground. Look at the thing called a bed, and survey
