these "Working Men's Hotels" are clean and comparatively comfortable, and are quite worthy of the name by which they are known.

The most luxurious of these buildings in London are those erected by the Rowton Company, started by Lord Rowton a few years ago.

For sevenpence a night, or in some cases sixpence, a man can obtain a bed in a separate cubicle, and during the day he has the run of the reading-room, library, smokingroom, and kitchen-all thoroughly well appointed; and at the same time he will find that every attention has been paid to sanitary and washing facilities, which are in accordance with the latest methods, and leave little to be desired. Lord Rowton has successfully demonstrated by these experiments that clean and well-arranged lodginghouses for single men can be built economically, and made to pay a full dividend upon capital laid out.

A somewhat similar undertaking has been started in Parker Street by the London County Council, and any one who wishes to learn for himself might do worse than pay a visit to this interesting establishment.

Another lodging-house of a cheaper character is provided in the neighbourhood of the Victoria Docks by Mansfield House University Settlement. At this place, which is known as "The Wave," a man can obtain a lodging which entitles him to a bed and to the use of kitchen and smoking-room for the very moderate sum of two shillings a week, and though the accommodation is not of quite the same class as that of those just mentioned, every care is taken that a clean, respectable lodging is provided for those who demand it. Here, too, it is found that the undertaking pays its way without difficulty, and this in spite of the fact that the class catered for is that of the dock labourer, one of the poorest in existence.

These experiments all go to prove that when such a building can be shown to be required to meet a recognised want, the enterprise can be undertaken by an individual or by a public body, with the confident expectation that if carefully and wisely administered, no financial loss will be incurred.

In carrying out these objects a great deal will depend upon the deputy who is placed in charge. Upon him must fall the immediate management of the establishment, and he will have to bear the whole responsibility of rejecting those who are not fit to be accommodated as lodgers. But if a suitable man be selected there will be every hope that the result of the undertaking will be to give a clean, respectable, healthy lodging in place of a dirty and disreputable one, and thus a decided benefit will have been conferred upon the community.

It must be borne in mind, however, that such a building should not be erected except where a very distinct need for one can be shown. Apart from the question of finance, it may often be extremely undesirable that too luxurious houses for single men should be in existence in glaring contrast to the squalor of many of the homes in which families are housed. The temptation for a man to desert his wife and children in East London and elsewhere is often great enough as it is; and the provision of cheerful abodes for those who are single should not be pushed the extent of making this temptation unusually

great.

Besides lodging-houses there are a number of shelters which provide something less by way of accommodation for a sum which is generally, wholly or in part, borne by some philanthropic agency. The discussion of these lies outside the present essay.

Various attempts have been made to provide for women what is strictly a lodging-house of a respectable kind, and it is needless to say that those which private enterprise have hitherto supplied are unspeakably bad. More numerous have been the various homes and institutions which are of a slightly different character. Whatever may be the value these may have for those for whom they are intended, they certainly do not meet the requirements of a lodging-house, for they impose conditions upon their inmates to which no respectable, independent girl could possibly submit. A women's lodging-house exists at Glasgow owned by the Corporation, concerning which I have the following information, kindly supplied by

Mr. Menzies, the manager of the City Improvements Department :

"The house was built about 1870, and has been twice enlarged, the cost now standing at £8,145-after writing off £883 to depreciation. It contains 284 beds, which are let nightly at 3d. and 4d. per bed. The house is always full, and the net return on the capital invested is about 5 per cent. There is also in Glasgow a small lodging-house belonging to the Salvation Army, and several others of a very poor character."

It would certainly seem that there is much left to be done in this direction in our larger cities; but the whole subject is fraught with peculiar difficulties which lie outside this essay.

A very different state of things presents itself to our notice when we come to study the question of the housing of families in our great cities.

In the wealthy suburbs we see the spacious houses of the rich and well-to-do; in other suburbs are the detached and semi-detached villas tenanted by the lower middle class; nearer to the heart of the city, or perhaps in a poorer class suburb, are to be seen streets upon streets of monotonous houses often inhabited by two, and sometimes by three or even four families belonging to the working classes; while hidden away from sight down a back court here, or a blind alley there, are the wretched, tumble-down dwellings, the slums of our great cities, in which the poorest of our population seek to find a shelter, if not a home. The housing problem, as it is generally thought of, is a problem compounded of the last two, or perhaps three, of these subdivisions.

To the clerks the problem presents itself as one of high rents and of time wasted in going to and from their work. With salaries ranging perhaps from £80 to £200 a year, it seems excessive that the rent should run up to £25 or £40, or even more, and that on the top of this should come rates and taxes and the heavy expenses of the journey to and from their work each day.

It is upon this class, with their very slender means, that the burden of living up to the conventional requirements

of the twentieth century presses most heavily, and often genuine necessities of life and health are sacrificed in the struggle; but fortunately a really satisfactory supply of living accommodation has been recognised as a conventional as well as a vital necessity, and in consequence the pinch of overcrowding is felt by this class of the community rather in the size of the slice withdrawn from their income than in the actual deprivation of light and air. The struggling gentility, the innumerable sacrifices of pleasure and comfort made in honour of the goddess of Appearance, are often a subject of mirth and derision both to those placed above them in the social scale and also to those who, earning not much inferior wages for manual labour, are freed from such tyrannous conformity to the demands of the times; but we cannot but recognise that it is not solely upon this class, but upon other sections of the community, that a large share of responsibility for this condition is to be placed. The evil of their lot lies in the fact that both their money and their time are completely exhausted before the essential needs of a full life are attained. Their income, impaired by convention, is further sapped by the ruinous expenses of their accommodation, leaving the barest margin for even the simplest necessaries; and the portion of daylight not allotted to the far from healthy occupations of their calling is consumed in the inevitable journeys to and from the suburbs in which their houses are situated.

The problem, as it strikes the great majority of the townspeople of our large cities—those who are engaged in regular manual work-is something different; to them it represents essentially the straitening of accommodation. As wages and rents vary considerably from town to town, it may be as well here to confine our figures to the great city of which we so often think when we speak of the housing problem. I mean, of course, to London itself, and we find here that these classes are in receipt of wages which may be taken as running from 22s. a week up to 40s. or a little more. Speaking generally, not a large proportion of them care to live at a great distance from their work, and the price which they find themselves

called upon to pay, viz., two or three shillings per room in the outer belt of the populated city, rising, as we approach the centre, to something like 7s. 6d. per room in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road, obliges them to give up a very large percentage of their income in house expenditure, or to put up with miserably inadequate accommodation.

Thus, though the artisan in good wages who is able to live in the outer belt may be able to have a whole cottage of four or five rooms to himself, if he will or must live nearer to the centre he is often obliged to put up with only two rooms; while the regular labourer in receipt of perhaps 22s. to 28s. a week is rarely able to attain more than half a house in the outer ring, and must content himself with two very miserable apartments, or perhaps even a single room, if by necessity or inclination he finds himself drawn into the vortex of the great city.

Thus it comes about that the people who live within inner London are housed a class worse than their means would indicate. The artisan who is not really poor is yet poorly housed; the labourer who is poor, but not very poor, is yet very poorly housed.

This general fact is well brought out by the statistics given by Mr. Charles Booth in his figures dealing with overcrowding within the County of London. He has divided the area up into an inner and an outer region, and he gives the figures for each trade for each. Thus he tells us, with respect to carpenters, that of those living in the inner area 44 per cent. live in what he describes as crowded accommodation, while for the outer belt only 27 per cent. suffer in this way. For the mason the figures are 60 and 39; for the bricklayers, 66 and 48; for engineering and shipbuilding, 43 and 22; for printers, 50 and 20; bookbinders, 52 and 26; and we might proceed to go through the whole list of trades and find similar results.

It is possible that there may be some difference between the character of the work done by the men living in the two regions, though they are called by the same namebetween the carpenters of the inner ring and the carpenters Two or more persons to one room.