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No Room to Live; the Plaint of Overcrowded London
No Room to Live the Plaint of Overcrowded London Author:Walter Besant, George Haw Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE OVERCROWDED FIFTH. Let us look as far and as fairly as we can at the way in which the London of to-day is overcrowded. No one person wi... more »ll ever know the whole truth. He could not bear to know it. To say there are so many hundred thousand people living in one-roomed homes, and so many hundred thousand more living in a state of overcrowding, is of the same kind of vagueness as to say there are so many hundred thousand stars in the heavens invisible to the naked eye. Figures are feeble things. Better know well and truly what one single overcrowded tenement means —what it means in sorrow and misery and pain—than have all the figures at one's finger-ends in their several hundred thousands which tell the tale of our overcrowded people. Still, let us look at the extent of the overcrowding, as far as we are able. Overcrowding, be it remembered, is not mere crowding. London always will be crowded. Bad though it be to live in any kind of crowded state, yet if that were all nobody would much complain. But it is over crowding we have to look at—the overcrowding that kills our babies, debases our boys, ruins our girls, enslaves our women, and drives our men to drink and crime. It is this that requires amendment. No newlaw is needed. Fully a fifth of the total population of London are at this moment overcrowded in spite of the law. This Overcrowded Fifth is living in houses in direct contravention of the Public Health Act of 1891. In other words, not far short of 900,000 people are in illegal occupation of dwelling-houses. Therefore, as one in every five of our fellow-citizens is overcrowded, let us find out where the line is drawn between crowding and overcrowding. What does overcrowding mean'? It means crowding over the line laid down by law. Imagine a house ...« less