the improvement trust continued to rent the most unsanitary of these buildings.

In 1911 the net result of the whole movement was 2,149 lodgings for the families of the laboring classes. The income from them is £25,000 ($121,750), which allows a payment of 34 per cent. interest and onethird of the amortization.

Liverpool has 759,000 inhabitants. It has constructed buildings representing a total of 2,686 lodgings. Condemnation and reconstruction have cost £1,000,000. In 1909 the net income was £21,711, or 2.17 per cent. The losses on worthless paper amounted to 6.74 per cent. Taking into account repairs, costs of administration, etc., the city of Liverpool collects 11⁄2d per pound sterling invested.

In Manchester (865,900 inhabitants) the financial results have been similar to those of Liverpool. Between 1845 and 1905 the city has rented 7,432 houses, 3,334 having been reopened after being renovated. The net income in 1910-1911 was £7,262 or 3.80 per cent. on a capital investment of £189,366. After deducting interest and sinking fund there is a loss of one penny per pound.

Leicester (227,242 inhabitants) has constructed two buildings, containing 42 apartments.

Richmond (36,493 inhabitants) has built 135 houses, which are bringing in £2,455 annually to offset an outlay of £38,683.

Folkstone (36,000 inhabitants) constructed 50 houses and then stopped.

At Sheffield the corporation bought a three-mile tract of land on the side of a hill, in the neighborhood of very valuable real estate. It was said that the object of certain municipal councillors was to play a good joke on the owners of this property. In the end the city was not only forced to buy more land, in order to construct a roundabout road, but, by an order of the King's Bench Division, it had also to pay a considerable indemnity to the aforesaid proprietors for the depreciation in value of their property.

Salford (231,380 inhabitants) has displayed very great activity along the direction of housing the working classes; 2,236 houses have been declared unfit for habitation, and 2,982 others have been reconstructed. In addition to these efforts, one building containing 69 apartments, 405 four-room houses, 134 with five rooms each, 95 with 6 rooms, or in all 703 lodgings, have been provided. Then a cheap hotel, with 285 rooms, and a building containing 32 shops have been also built. The average rent is I shilling 4 pence per week, while in the rest of the city 5s and 5s 9d are paid for a 4-room lodging.

But since the motives which actuate committees appointed to select tenants may be of various kinds and more or less complex, it is customary for such bodies to favor tenants who are willing to offer a higher rent.

Here we have the sketch of the great municipal work of cheap housing in Great Britain. The London County Council has evicted 45,000 persons and lodged 51,000. Fortunately there are still a few individuals or private groups who construct houses, otherwise the 4,486,000 inhabitants of the city of London, for whom municipal lodgings are not provided, would be condemned to dwell in the open air.

But the action of the London County Council has at least brought about one result, for, since 1889, no more great associations are being formed in London for promoting public housing.

But has any service been rendered to the people by this attempt to paralyze private initiative?

"Every house which is built by public authority," says Mr. Nettle ford, "prevents the construction of at least four houses which would have been built by individuals," and he cites striking examples from Birmingham.

"The partisans of municipalization conduct you," says Edwin Cannon, "past thousands of houses, lodging tens of thousands of inhabitants, to a half dozen houses built at a loss by the municipality and then say to you solemnly: 'Private initiative is weak'; when all the time the facts are demonstrating the strength of private and the weakness of municipal initiative." 1

When the inhabitants of the slums do not go to live in the municipal houses the advocates of Municipal Socialism say: "But they can occupy the lodg

ings left vacant by those who do come to live in them."

The dispossessed are simply driven from hovel to hovel; they are not housed.1

Lord Rosebery, in a speech delivered at Shoreditch, at the ceremony of the opening of the workmen's houses, said: "You have lodged 300 families, but you have dislodged many more. That seems to me a droll way to house the poor."

Socialists are acknowledging the defeat of the movement. Bernard Shaw, however, while pointing out the practical impossibility of establishing municipal lodgings, concludes that the only solution to the problem is the municipalization of the soil.

'Boverat, Le Socialisme Municipal en Angleterre et les Résultats Financiers.

CHAPTER XIV

HOUSING OF THE WORKING CLASSES ON THE CONTINENT

1. Housing People of One Class at the Expense of Those of Another.-Private Initiative.-The Call of the City and Return to the Soil.-Pretexts.-Foreign Examples.

2. Germany.

3. Italy.

4. Belgium.

5. Holland.

6. Switzerland.

7. Austria.

8. Hungary.

9. Sweden and Norway.

10. Conclusions of the Report of the Municipal Council of Paris. Denying Facts.-The Strength of Private Initiative. Weakness of Municipal Efforts.

II. Conclusions.

1. There are men who, full of sympathy for their fellow men, wish to house them, feed them, and dress them, but at whose expense? The trouble is they want to house people of one class at the cost of another.

Of late years the activity of the partisans of municipalization and socialism has been turned toward the housing of the working classes, as if the term "working classes" alone were not sufficient to indicate the retrogressive character of such measures. They are