First, as to overcrowding. This is a question that distinctly affects the state, and with regard to which we have to “live in the whole,” and to see that the welfare of the community is at stake, and that the state must have an authoritative voice in it. Virtue, sobriety, decency, are physically impossible in the conditions under which a vast number of its citizens are living. The national health and morals are in danger. All the arguments that justified the interference of the state with the rights of the Irish landlord, apply equally to the London landlords, and the artificial forcing up of rents, which has resulted from the necessity many workmen are under of living near their work. Yet this question has been the subject of permissive legislation! The Artisans’ Dwellings Improvement Act, an honest attempt on the part of Sir Richard Cross to deal with the problem, was rendered applicable to all towns of 28,000 inhabitants or upward—that is to say, about eighty towns—but it was entrusted to the municipalities to carry it out, the town councils which we have left to be composed chiefly of men of narrow education, largely swayed by self-interest, and probably extensive owners of the very property to be demolished! It is exactly as if the Irish Land Bill had been permissive, and entrusted to the Irish landlords to put it into execution! Can we wonder that in about sixty out of the eighty towns, it remains a dead letter? In eleven it has led to discussion; in two or three it has led to the demolition of buildings, but not to their erection. Is there not a want of ordinary _seeing_ in our moral life? Could we hope to solve a single scientific problem on the methods on which we are content to live? “The commercial success,” as Mr. Peek observes, “that has been achieved by several of the Artisans’ Dwellings Companies which, while providing good houses, yet pay fair dividends, shows that the poorest pay rents which give a fair interest on capital, so that the municipality will not be compelled to embark in a ruinous undertaking, or one that will not pay in the long run, to say nothing of the gain to the health and morals of the nation.”