We are a slow moving race. We generally do our legislative reforms by a succession of statutes vigorously fought over and hacked about by gay party spirits whose nearest idea of patriotism is to queer the other fellow's pitch and spoil his budding statute by crimping amendments that he knows will make it unworkable. We have only gone a little way with the Housing business as yet, and if the next statute on the matter could be put in the hands of a small committee of both parties to draft and bring before the House, perhaps we should get somewhat nearer finality. It is rather melancholy reading to pick up the latest pamphlet of the bookstall on the Housing Question and find much of the writer's ingenuity wasted in trying to prove that his party, and his only, has in the past made any effort to better the housing of the people, and that in the future there is only one honest capable scheme which is worthy of consideration. There is not much real help in these essays. Their burden is always the same. Recollect at the Election time--"Short's very well as far as he goes, but the real friend is Codlin--not Short." The truth is that neither party has done very much. The history of the matter is much as follows: Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities. Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. This truth has not been taught us by the priests and politicians of our time, but by our men of letters. Dickens knew all about it and prophesied in despair that we should have to wait for five hundred years for reform. You remember Tom-all-Alone's where Jo lives: "It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who, after establishing their own possessions took to letting them out in lodgings. Now these tumbling tenements contain by night a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years--though born expressly to do it."