The Cottage Homes of England The Case Against the Housing System in Rural Districts Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Cottage Homes of England: The Case Against the Housing System in Rural Districts

This unimportance in the rural poor is due to something irrational and ramshackle in the framework of their life they do not feel like low squat pillars of the State, people supporting something, as most peasants do. They feel more like a fugitive and accidental riff-rafi, like gypsies or migratory J ews. They are the thistle-down and not the grass. The strong English sense of humour, the perverse English good temper, is indeed not wholly destroyed in the villages. It is not wholly destroyed at the hulks. But no conditions perhaps ever existed which in their absence of security, clear citizenship, religion, or nationa tradition, were so calculated to make a man lose everything, as those which fester behind those fiower-olad walls, which Mr. Crotch so vividly describes. He very truly says that the picturesqueness of those rose-covered cottages should not colourour conception too much. The roses are all outside such places the thorns are within.

Touching the second question, Mr. Crotch answers substantially and positively that this disease of the countryside is not the decay of a people, but the paralysis of a system of government. He points out that the conception of municipal housing as some thing odd or Socialistic is essentially a new conception, one of the recent assertions of the most vulgar individualism and that the great thirteenth century took for granted that common government as well as individual charity should build for the poor. He points out that the evil is not due to any primal and physical development (such, for instance, as over population) but to the extraordinary existing arrangements for such people as there are. By a horrible paradox, there is overcrowding even when there are not enough people. Mr. Crotch also goes through the main events of the history of the problem and propounds, in no uncertain terms, his own views of the mistakes of the past and the best remedies to be employed in the future. But of these, of course, he can speak best for himself.

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