The Government and the local authorities are to pay about half the cost of building a multitude of houses, the assistance being given on the sole condition that they fall below a certain standard of size and comfort, and the industrial employer will be able to pay low wages in proportion to the cheapness attained. In other words, the Labour Government is doing a deal with the building trade in the interest of the low-grade employer and is putting British industry “on the rates.” They are returning by a circuitous route to the condition of things in England before the New Poor Law, when farmers grew rich by employing labour in receipt of outdoor relief, at otherwise impossibly low wages. The most striking thing about these housing proposals is the tacit acceptance by all parties in Parliament that the population of the coming years must be put away, each family in a little separate house of its own. If anything was needed to prove that the Socialism of the Labour Party was merely skin deep and its creative intentions an electioneering bid, it would be this. If one thing is clearer than another in the outlook of the modern community, it is the impossibility of the small separate house. It is a cage of needless toil for women; it is a place of deprivation and hardship for children. The whole drift of things is in favour of the highly organised block building containing a great number of houses. In this there can be electric light, radiators, a supply of hot and cold water, efficient sanitary accommodation, group wash-houses, adequate cupboards, and convenient shopping facilities, all provided at a less cost than is needed for the same number of scattered low-grade homes, each under its separate roof, with lamps to clean, fires to light, water to boil, and every possible demand for feminine drudgery and servitude. In their dreams people think of Mr. Wheatley’s projected houses as little flower-girdled cottages, each with a bright little garden and a drying-ground and an uncontrolled multitude of children playing in the sun; in reality we shall get rows and rows of mean little boxes on the outskirts of our towns, jammed together into slums, each fouling the air with a separate chimney, and remote from every modern amenity.