When we look beneath the surface and ask the reasons why the poor cannot find houses in which they can live with comfort, we discover that it is a matter of finance. The extortionate prices of building sites render it impossible to build on them any dwelling-houses except tenements. Here is an example: {89} 'Unless the land were given you, you could not possibly build cottages,' says the Secretary of the Guinness Trust. 'Our new site, which was supposed to be sold to us on cheap terms, cost £11,000 an acre, so that you can see the landrent per tenement will work out at about 2s. 6d. a week, and as I say, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners professed to sell to us at a low rate, having regard to our objects. It is really not a stiff price for the position.' In this bare statement we touch bedrock. The Guinness Trust, founded with the philanthropic purpose of providing decent housing for the poor, buys an acre for building purposes from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who, from their very name, must be interested in the poor, and they get it cheap at £11,000 an acre! What does it mean this fabulous cost of land in great cities? A hundred years ago that acre would be bought and sold at its agricultural value of a few score pounds sterling. Whence, then, this inflated price? The {90} answer is that the people created that value. We deprived them of the land of England and drove them to the cities. In the cities they, by their labour, made the land valuable; and the value which they themselves created we turn against them. We exiled the people from the soil; and in the cities, where we piled them, we turned the values, which they created, into an instrument for their ultimate destruction. They have made the land so valuable that cottages can no longer be built on it, and the man with four children searches in vain for a house. It is a staggering product of a perfect civilisation. And still more staggering when one realises that the birthrate of these poor people, for whom the Guinness Trust provides some measure of comfort, is 36.95 per thousand, as compared to 17.53 in the west. The section of the population still willing to carry on the race must pay £11,000 an acre for the sites of their teeming tenements. Only after that form can civilisation make room for the child. {91} IV