Two sets of basement rooms at 5s. 6d. visited during the investigation were extremely dark and damp. In both cases the amount of coal burned was unusually large, as was also the amount of gas. One of these basements was reached by stairs from within the house, the other from a deep area without. The former was warmer, but more airless, while the latter was impossible to warm in any way. The airlessness of basement dwellings is much enhanced by the police regulations, which insist on shut windows at night on account of the danger of burglary! Both the women in these two homes were languid and pale, and suffered from anæmia. The first had lost three children out of seven; the second, one out of four. Four and six paid for two rooms meant two tiny rooms below the level of the alley-way outside—rooms which measured each about 12 feet square. A family of six persons lived in them. Four children were living, and five had died. The question of vermin is a very pressing one in all the small houses. No woman, however clean, can cope with it. Before their confinements some women go to the trouble of having the room they are to lie in fumigated. In spite of such precautions, bugs have dropped on to the pillow of the sick woman before the visitor’s eyes. One woman complained that they dropped into her ears at night. Another woman, when the visitor cheerily alluded to the lovely weather, answered in a voice of deepest gloom: “Lovely fer you, miss, but it brings out the bugs somethink ’orrible.” The mothers accept the pest as part of their dreadful lives, but they do not grow reconciled to it. Re-papering and fumigation are as far as any landlord goes in dealing with the difficulty, and it hardly needs saying that the effects of such treatment are temporary only. On suggesting distemper rather than a new paper in a stuffy little room, the visitor was met with the instant protest: “But it wouldn’t keep the bugs out a minute.” It would seem as though the burning down of such properties were the only cure. The fault is not entirely that either of the sanitary authorities or of the immediate landlords. Nor is the blame to be given to the people living in these houses. In spite of being absurdly costly, they are too unhealthy for human habitation. Sanitation has improved vastly in the last dozen years, though there is still a great need for more qualified, authoritative women sanitary inspectors. But no inspection and no subsequent tinkering can make a fundamentally unhealthy house a proper home for young children. The sanitary standard is still deplorably low. That is simply because it has to be low if some of these houses are to be considered habitable at all, and if others are to be inhabited by two, and often by three, families at the same time.