MUNICIPAL BUILDING

But someone will object: 'There is no time to open up communications; the people die while public opinion grows. Something must be done at once.'

The objection is natural. Human nature would not be itself if it did not feel passionate because of the evil and sorrows which come of overcrowding. The rapid remedy is thus popular, and municipalities are more and more pressed to undertake the building of houses. The difficulty of expense is disregarded; and when at a Council meeting it is reported that some thousands of pounds have been written off so that rooms may be let at three shillings a week, someone asks, Why not write off more, so that they may be let at two shillings?' A property lately bought by the London Council, on which to build houses for the people, will cost the ratepayers 600l. a family, and in previous operations every person displaced has cost 50l. The expense would, of course, put a limit on operations. But there are other difficulties than that of expense which are bound up with municipal building. (1) The occupants of such buildings would form a privileged class, inhabiting houses at a lower rent or of superior accommodation to those which can be provided by private persons or companies. (2) Municipal bodies are not always economical administrators. They find it hard to discharge incompetent agents; there is a necessarily wooden element in their system which prevents ready adaptation to changing needs; and there is a constant tendency for expenses to rise. They may therefore have to call on the community, the majority of whom live in houses which pay their way, to bear some of the cost of houses inhabited by a small minority. (3) Another difficulty is the creation of a body of voters living in close contact and able to act together, who might control the election of the local candidate for the Council. They would be tempted to put their interests as tenants before the common interests of the neighbourhood. Lower rents' would not be an elevating election cry, and, if it became common, would utterly demoralise local government. (4) There is also the possible check to private enterprise which might follow, and is already said to have followed, the appearance of a competitor drawing on the public rates and depending on the public credit. (5) Municipal building, lastly, plays into the hands of the landholders by becoming another rich competitor for the acquisition of their possessions.

Municipal building has undoubtedly met some needs, and some municipal bodies have, by their public spirit and by the devotion of some of their members, shown themselves fitted for the work; but on the whole I am disposed to think that municipal building is a mistake. The large housing scheme just undertaken by the London Council is probably justified under the pressure of the present opinion, but the probable cost, the necessary delay in its completion, and the

narrow margin within which it is expected to return only 3 per cent. do not encourage the hope that the Council will be large purveyors of houses. The committee and the officials have put in long and devoted work, 29,000l. are to be advanced out of the rates, 1,615,000l. are to be borrowed, and at the end of some eight or ten years 33,000 persons will be housed. The small builders in one year house four times as many. The scheme is an experiment which will be educational.

But the ready remedy is rarely the best remedy; it too often gambles with the future, spending to-day the resources which will be wanted for to-morrow. What will be the advantage if a few thousand persons are at once housed, if hereafter discontent is encouraged, if the community is burdened with non-paying house property, or if an enlightened policy is burdened by the self-interest of the tenants? What will be the advantage if by the use of a powerful drug the wretchedness of the houseless is removed, and at the same time the natural forces at work against such wretchedness be weakened? There is so much more than houses which is necessary for the houseless, and the chief thing is to keep active that sympathy, that enterprise, and that devotion which are ready to look after all needs.

The truth is that municipal building is too easy and too cheap a remedy. The evil is too great to be met by a vote of millions of money. The neglect of individuals, the apathy of public opinion through many years, can only be made up by the activity of individuals and the lively interest of public opinion.

A

There are, as I have said, some definite things to be done, some changes in the law to be made; but the chief thing wanted is the individual consciousness of duty. A restless anxiety to be doing something or pity for the sorrows of others is not enough. thought, an idea, a belief in order-in, to use the old phrase, the Kingdom of Heaven-is the only inspiration which makes action continuous and helpful. When this individual and that individual believe that health and happiness are possible in a city for all the citizens; when they recognise in the lowest not a poor creature to be pitied, but a citizen whose service of body, soul, and mind is wanted, they will work in a different way to make the city as it is more like the city as they see it ought to be.

This may seem an unpractical conclusion to a paper on the housing problem; but it has been my privilege to be engaged in practical measures for help of the poor during the last thirty years, and at the end my conclusion is that practice fails for want of knowledge and of faith. The housing problem cannot be solved by itself; it is bound up with the industrial problem, with the education problem, with the social problem, and with the religious problem. When each individual or more individuals take pains to get knowledgeto know their neighbours, to know their condition, to know what is

good and what is evil-and when each and every one takes trouble to find out what it is they believe, what about the present and what about the future, then the community will certainly find a guidance to action safer than that which any reformers or politicians can give.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

THE NOVELS OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE

LORD BEACONSFIELD was the Paul Veronese of English Novelists. It would be waste of time to inquire what artist's name could be bracketed with Anthony Trollope, for Mr. Trollope was not an artist, he was a photographer. It was only for the improvement of his style that he subjected himself to discipline. In this he persevered until he developed a narrative style which, for his purpose, could hardly be surpassed: it is lucid and easy, if somewhat commonplace. For the rest of an artist's work Trollope cared nothing. He did not devise new and startling plots, life as he knew it being sufficiently varied and interesting to satisfy ordinary people. He took pride in remaining an ordinary person himself, and in appealing to everyday emotion and narrating everyday experiences. What he saw he could tell better, perhaps, than anybody else, as Mr. Browning somewhat grudgingly said of Andrea del Sarto. What he did not see, did not exist for him. He had something of the angry impatience of the middle-class mind with all points of view not his own. In Barchester Towers he permitted himself to gibe at the recently published novel Tancred, and for the author as well as the work he cherished a feeling of contemptuous dislike. There could be no finer tribute to Lord Beaconsfield's genius. Tancred is as far beyond anything that Mr. Trollope wrote as Orley Farm is superior to a Chancery pleading; and we have but to lay Alroy on the same table with The Prime Minister to see where Anthony Trollope stands.

It is nearly twenty years since he died, and his work has been going steadily out of fashion every year. It is instructive to consider what kind of work has taken its place. The regrettable outpourings that well-educated people are contented to accept as literature, and to admit to their drawing-rooms, are, after all, a sorry substitute for Orley Farm and Dr. Wortle's School. But inasmuch as his work is, for the present generation of readers, dead, it may be well to recall shortly the well-filled life and varied labours of the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century.

His life was not long: he died in 1882, at the age of sixty-seven. But to have produced for thirty-five years a novel a year, to have

hunted with English and Irish packs for the greater part of that time, to have negotiated postal arrangements with Egypt, the West Indies, and the United States, to have led an admirable domestic life, and to have been welcomed in many clubs, is the record of a life of remarkable vigour and geniality. To say that he could tell what he saw is not to say much when we are speaking of ordinary men. But Trollope's life was exceptionally full, and his powers of observation equally exceptional. If all this be true, it may well be asked, Why is such good work neglected? The answer is, It is not that the work is bad: it is because the world in which Trollope lived has passed away. Witness this comment from He Knew he was Right:

The Foreign Office is always very civil to its next-door neighbour of the Colonies-civil and cordial, though perhaps a little patronising. A Minister is a bigger man than a Governor; and the smallest of the diplomatic fry are greater swells than even secretaries in quite important dependencies. The attaché, though he be unpaid, dwells in a capital and flirts with a countess. The Governor's right-hand man is confined to an island and dances with a planter's daughter. The distinction is quite understood, but is not incompatible with much excellent good feeling on the part of the superior Department.

To those who remember the Sleepy Hollow of Downing Street twenty years ago, this passage is not extravagant: as a description of the Colonial Office of to-day it has no relation to the facts. And this reflection brings us to the point of considering how far it is true that Mr. Trollope's world has passed away. The question is important; for the answer may explain the artificial air pervading all of this novelist's work. It is not that Trollope saw inaccurately, for his contemporaries-Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example-looked upon him as an impeccable realist. To what, then, are we to ascribe the altered views that are held to-day? Perhaps to the change of public taste which gives a French novelist (with rare exception) a life of hardly more than ten years. But more, perhaps, to the changed circumstances in which we live. The institutions to which we are accustomed are in Mr. Trollope's books, and yet they are not: for this very reason his writing is of value to the student of history, social or political.

All Mr. Trollope's characters live under the domination of four leading ideas: the supremacy of the House of Commons in the government of this country, the authority of the Press, the grip of the Church on the life of the nation, and the prestige of the marriage tie. To take these points in order: a reader under fiveand-twenty years of age who takes up Mr. Trollope's novels finds in them little that he is accustomed to when considering the government of his country. Mr. Trollope's young men enter Parliament, or endeavour to do so, with the idea that they are aiming at the noblest position to which an Englishman can aspire, a position where they will be called upon to discharge important duties. There have