At present a large part of the population of East London lives in small houses of two stories, or two stories and a basement. Idiotic foreign visitors surveying this from train windows remark on the Englishman’s superb individualism, so that every man’s house is his castle. In the East End no man’s house is his castle; every floor, and often every room, is a separate household, and sometimes these households entertain lodgers. This state of affairs the new Labour legislation will extend and perpetuate. Yet plans have been made that show beyond dispute that the whole population of industrial London could be rehoused in fine and handsome apartment buildings, with night and day lifts, roof-gardens, and nearly all the light, air, and conveniences to be found in a Kensington flat, at hardly greater cost than would be needed to choke all the ways out of London with a corresponding spread of Wheatley hovels, and so great an amount of space could be saved by doing so that half that area of London could be made into a playground and garden. But even to entertain schemes of that sort requires imagination, and the new Labour Government has shown itself the least imaginative of Governments. It has excreted or suppressed all its creative elements. It is a class-Government, and it embodies the subdued mind of the common wages-earner. Whatever is, it accepts, from Court costume to slums. Its idea of life is the life of the back street in which it has always lived, and it wants more back streets and cheaper back streets to live in, with an occasional treat in the garden of Buckingham Palace. In dealing with housing, just as in dealing with mines or with transport, it shows itself incapable of any breadth or power of initiative.