Here we have a short record of some fifty years of legislative effort--more or less honest--in which each party has sought to promote measures to help the poor who are oppressed, as Lord Salisbury said, by this "scandal to our civilisation," the want of decent housing. And yet how little has been achieved, how small the results, how disappointing to find the great men who talked in Parliament and sat on Commissions and discussed these matters with so much learning and ability passing away and leaving this problem for us to tackle, and we on our part looking idly on and still wondering what can be done. If our schoolmasters had taught us how to make bricks and build with them instead of how to read books and write more of them, better results perhaps had been already achieved. There are many acres of houses in England built prior to 1870 that exhibit all the slum traits that have been so eloquently described in literature, and many millions of our fellow citizens live in houses which fall below the minimum standard of sanitation where the decent separation of the sexes is impossible and the general conditions of life are sunless and miserable. The amount of overcrowding in England and Wales is shown graphically enough in the census returns for 1911. Overcrowding from a census point of view means that more than two persons live in a room, counting the kitchen as a room, but not the scullery. "Thus," as the Editor of the Land Inquiry Report tells us, "if a tenement or cottage consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen, the Census Authorities would only describe it as overcrowded if there were more than six persons living in it, no matter how small the rooms. The Census test of overcrowding is, in fact, quite inadequate to measure the full extent of the evil, and there is great need for the adoption of a more accurate one. Even adopting this standard, however, the Census Authorities find that one-tenth of the total urban population of England and Wales are overcrowded. This means that nearly 3,000,000 persons are overcrowded." No one who is constantly meeting the victims of this state of affairs, and discussing with them, as a County Court Judge has to do, their domestic affairs, can fail to be struck with the large amount of infantile mortality and disease, and the prevalence of tuberculosis and the general physical and moral weariness and debility, which may in a great measure be traced to the bad conditions in which the working classes must perforce live because there is nothing better obtainable.