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 THE ETHICS 
 
 OF 
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 
 
 Bei^rinted from 
 THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, APRIL, 1879. 
 
 ^onboit : 
 HODDEK AND STOUGHTON, 
 
 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
 
 TtyTEN allow ns to jn'ocectl, ivhilc we confine ourselves to general 
 truths, u)itil they see that they themselves are iiuplicated in 
 them, and have to act vpon them ; and then they suddenly come to 
 a stand ; they collect themselves and draiv hack, and say they 
 do not see tliis — or do not admit that ; and they look about for 
 excuses, and. they say that ive carry tJiinys too far, and that ire 
 are extravagant, and that we ought to limit and modify what 
 ive say, that we do not take into account times, and seasons, and 
 the like. Tliis is what they pretend ; and well has it been said, 
 ' Where there is a xvill there is aicay ;' for there is no truth, 
 however overpoweringly clear, but men may escape from it by 
 shutting their eyes; there is no duty, liowever urgent, but tJiey 
 may find ten thousand good reasons against it in their own case. 
 And they are sure to say we carry things too far, rrJien we carry 
 them home to themselves. — John Henry Newman.
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 
 
 LEASEHOLDS are eviscerated freeholds stuffed with law ; a 
 process first contrived when legal subtlety was perfectl}- 
 matured, but social science and political economy were j^et 
 unknown. Property in land was then a corpus vile for the 
 lawyers, who regarded it as a peculiar subject for their 
 cleverest devices. Its superior productive capabilities were 
 little cared for; agriculture made no cognizable progress, but 
 no method for encumbering the land with trammels and com- 
 plexities of law was, seemingly, neglected. The result appears 
 in almost every acre of the soil, in almost every building on 
 the land ; but the bad influence of leasehold tenure is most 
 evident in metropolitan and urban buildings, and on those who 
 are in anj^ way connected with them, whether freeholders of 
 building land and their lessees, or builders, tenants, occupiers, 
 we may even add beholders of our modern leasehold houses. 
 
 The freeholder, for whose behoof the system was invented, 
 has a claim for special pity. He may possibly have been a 
 blissful, unsophisticated, pastoral proprietor, but, in an evil 
 hour, his men of business tell him that his quiet fields have 
 been developed into building land ; and then his miser}?- 
 ])egins. He seems to see before him the potentiality^ of wealth 
 Avithout exertion. He is called, by reason of this building 
 land, a man of property ; and hearing, and of course believing
 
 4 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 this, lie far too often calculates liis expectations as realities, 
 and so begins to live, apart from fact, in dreamy hope. Thus 
 his individuality and manliness are lost— sunk in the land. 
 Afflicted with possession on the brain he loses self-possession, 
 and his neighbours say that he ' belongs to the estate,' which 
 is indeed a true account of his condition. Moreover, in 
 a year or two the monetary gain, whatever it may be in pro- 
 spect, is in thought discounted, and there remains mere 
 eagerness for prompt acquirement. The man, in fact, is badly 
 off, for he has lost contentment. 
 
 Meanwhile the lawyers and the ' architects ' are realizing 
 what the man of property can only make his hope ; they 
 plan and litigate, as leaseholds need, and get their costs. 
 The sewers and roads are also made at a large outlay, bringing 
 no immediate return, but yielding a commission to the ' archi- 
 tect,' and then the property is quiet for some years. 
 
 At length a plot of land is let to a smart enterprising 
 builder, highly recommended by his timber merchant; and to 
 induce the builder to proceed * with spirit,' and secure the 
 ground rents, liberal cash advances from the fortunate pro- 
 prietor are suggested, and eventually made. The ' architect ' 
 will certify the cost of building work to warrant each advance, 
 and the solicitor will take the builder's equitable security, and 
 his receipt ; the fees remaining with the * architect ' and 
 lawyer as before. The freeholder once more is good for all, 
 but gets no gain. 
 
 The work, however, does proceed with spirit. Possibl}^ a 
 dozen ' carcasses ' are soon in a condition for the first 
 advance ; and so they rapidly proceed till all are covered in. 
 And then the builder, having gained his stipulated cash 
 advance upon the maximum of rough material, to be paid for 
 when his three months' bills are honoured, and on the mini- 
 mum of costly labour which he has to pay for promptly in 
 days' wages, can with cheerfulness look round him; and, his 
 friendly timber merchant being paid, he offers, and a liberal
 
 UEBAN LEASEHOLDS. O 
 
 offer too, his general creditors five shillings in the pound. 
 The creditors, -who know their business, acquiesce ; and, 
 IDOcketing their dividend, are quite prepared to trade with the 
 same enterprising builder on some other ' freehold property ' 
 where * cash advances will be made.' 
 
 The secret of their confidence is this, that builders' trades- 
 men carefully insure themselves against such ' accidental ' 
 losses by extravagant excess of prices ; and these heaped up 
 prices do, to some extent, affect the entire building trade. Of 
 course, then, the great public pays, but is 'too occupied with 
 business ' to consider. In one trade there is a discount or 
 commission of from thirt}' - three to forty-eight per cent. '"" 
 beyond the ordinary business profit, and the other trades are 
 liberal in a corresponding way. 
 
 When on a Tuesday morning news arrives from the estate 
 that all the work is stopped — for speculating builders are 
 most careful to obtain advances for the payment of their 
 men on Saturday — the ' architect ' is naturally sorry ; more 
 particularly if, on very careful scrutiny, the carcasses appear 
 to be in every way defective, thoroughly ill-built, requiring 
 much upholding, and, in fact, not worth the cost of the 
 material. The freeholder is philosophical, or foolish, as the 
 fates permit ; his ground rents are still unsecured, and his 
 advances have resulted in a pile of hideous brickwork, an 
 advertisement of evil on his property. The lawyer and the 
 ' architect ' explain the nature of the case, and the result is 
 that the carcasses are sold for what they may be worth, and 
 our proprietor goes softly for his time of mourning. He has 
 realized the loss that, in conjunction with the profit which 
 his men of business tell him must soon come, is held to con- 
 stitute a sound and healthy character of business, as distinct 
 from mere reception and acquirement. 
 
 * We might quote a trade in which the discount is full fifty per cent. In 
 bankruptcies the tradesman thus can take ten shillings in the pound and yet 
 secure a profit.
 
 b THE ETHICS OF 
 
 After a year or two of patience and consideration land is let 
 again, at probably a great reduction on the former rental, 
 for the carcasses have brought some disrepute upon the land. 
 The freeholder, refusing to 'advance,' discovers that his pro- 
 perty is worth no more than half of what he previously had 
 been instructed to expect ; and so he w'isely learns to limit all 
 his reckonings to what he has in hand. Meanwhile, if settle- 
 ments and possible encumbrances weigh heavily upon the 
 man of property the ground rents are sold off as fast as they 
 are made ; and so eventually, after years of trouble and 
 anxiety and risk, the end of all may be that he is not insol- 
 vent, and is very thankful that his means, apart from his 
 ' estate,' have saved him. If he has been cautious, free from 
 spendthrift habits, and a man of sense, he may avoid extreme 
 disaster, but in most cases ultimate success is slow, and verj- 
 moderate. 
 
 Of course, the public are not in the counsel of these men of 
 property ; and, in their magnifying way, they take the gross 
 for something like the net return of building land. But if the 
 histories and titles of suburban property in ground rents were 
 investigated, it would soon appear that the reputed rapid in- 
 crement of wealth to the original proprietor is a delusion, and 
 that an ' estate ' is often but a cumbrous and expensive means 
 of wasting life and intellect for a vain show; that had the free- 
 holder disposed of all his land, with prudent temporary build- 
 ing covenants, in lots as buildings were required, and then 
 invested the proceeds in interest-paying, sound securities, his 
 fortune would have been much greater, his encumbrances 
 much less, time, health, and possibly some credit, would have 
 happily been saved, and years of disappointment, care, and 
 foolish expectation would have been avoided. 
 
 This is a fair account of many an enterprising freeholder's 
 experience. In other cases speculating men of business take 
 the land, with all its risks and care, at a low ground rent ; and 
 by sub-letting to the builders make in time what are most
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. / 
 
 infelicitoiisly called 'improved' ground-rents. * Arcliitects ' 
 and lawyers are employed to let the land, and to invite their 
 clients to ' advance to builders ' at ' good interest.' This goes 
 on, possibly, for years, -with good or evil fortune for the specu- 
 lator; but the builder's usual course is one of ill-considered 
 enterprise, extravagant expenditure, anticipated profits, and 
 frequent 'compromise' or bankruptcy; and for the tradesmen 
 there are heavy risks, completely, or it may be incompletely, 
 covered by insurance prices. ' Architects ' and lawyers get, of 
 course, their fees; and the confiding client-mortgagee receives, 
 for a few years perhaps, his interest, and then possession of 
 a range of showy-looking houses made of half-baked clay, and 
 mud, and compo, with raw shrinking timber, gaping joiner's 
 work, foul chimneys, unsound roofs, damp basement rooms, 
 and inefficient drains. The public thus are providently housed. 
 
 It must be evident, however, that the method is expensive. 
 The extent of land round London needlessly withdrawn from 
 agriculture, though for years unused for building ; the long 
 lines, and even widespread neighbourhoods of carcasses that 
 stand unfinished, and of houses equally unlet, mean grievous 
 loss and waste, which some one has to suffer. Certainly, the 
 builders cannot be the losers ; and, in brief, the public pays. 
 When to this dead loss are added all the multiplied and heavy 
 untaxed costs of ' architects ' and lawyers, the insm-ance profit, 
 twenty-five per cent, or even thirty, for the tradesmen, and the 
 constant outlay that the rickety and unsound work requires, it 
 must be clear that leasehold house providing is a most extra- 
 vagant and wasteful system, which, when they learn to under- 
 stand it, men of sense will not endure. 
 
 Besides all this excessive costliness, the houses are them- 
 selves a constant tax on physical endurance, and on social 
 comfort and economy. The freeholder's estate is planned with 
 no regard at all for those who will, by force of leasehold cus- 
 tom, be compelled to suffer in the houses. * Architects ' lay 
 out the roads and streets with reference to frontages alone,
 
 8 THE ETHICS OP 
 
 and on the length of frontage so contrived, the extremest sub- 
 division possible for sites of houses, to obtain the greatest 
 rental from the land, is made. The houses are to be the 
 narrowest that the public will, in each locality, endure ; and 
 certainly the public are extremely squeezable. The conse- 
 quences are small incommodious chambers, well called ' sitting ' 
 rooms, in which the necessary or unnecessary furniture so oc- 
 cupies the little space that those for whom they are supposed 
 to be constructed ought to be incapable of movement, basement 
 kitchens, dog-leg staircases (most aptly named), few rooms to 
 live in on a floor and many floors of height, the thinnest 
 walls the Building Act permits, abundance of cheap ' deco- 
 ration,' a fine coat of stucco, with the ' architectural efl'ect ' of 
 cornices and columns to distract attention from the meanness 
 of the work, and such a want of liberal adaptation and amenity 
 as quite forbids the sense of comfort, and prevents the house 
 from ever being honoured or rejoiced in as a home. 
 
 The ordinary term for building leases is from eighty to a 
 hundred years. Eenewals, or new leases on a rack house 
 rent, are generally granted for from twenty- one to forty years. 
 These terms becoming always shorter by the lapse of time, 
 the average present length of London leases is not more than 
 thirty years. Of course, then, a shrewd leaseholder restricts 
 his outlay on improvements and repairs ; and probabl}^ at 
 length from sheer disgust he sells his houses to some specu- 
 lator in bad leasehold remanets. They are then treated as 
 mere rent producers, to be crammed with lodger-tenants, and 
 be utterly used up ; and in such tenements one half of what 
 are called the floating population live. 
 
 The long continuance and the general extension of the 
 leasehold system are an evidence of the habitual neglect of men 
 to study questions which, in some sense public, yet most 
 intimately concern themselves. In this case failure to per- 
 ceive the obvious connection between a harmless-looking legal 
 document and its widespread damaging effect becomes the
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 9 
 
 cause of constant sufi'ering and error. Freeholders, for in- 
 stance, never seem to understand their actual position, but 
 unlearnedly imagine that as they hold their land in fee they 
 have control of that which other people, builders, place upon 
 it ; that when they let their freehold land for building they 
 obtain a freehold price by woy of rental, and that the reversion, 
 after ninety years or so, is worth consideration and of present 
 value. These all are fallacies : the freeholder's control is 
 very superficial, and his ground rents, even on the large 
 estates in Westminster and Bloomsbury, are an economic 
 error, a financial waste. A simple process of arithmetic will 
 show that if a man of statutable age grants building leases 
 for the usual term, the reversion of the buildings cannot be,, 
 within an ordinary lifetime, of appreciable worth. It is 
 moreover evident that a clear title, with no covenants and 
 no superior control, must be more valuable than a lease con- 
 taining cumbrous stipulations, with the possibility of legal 
 complications, unanticipated loss or even forfeiture. The de- 
 preciated worth of leasehold property compared with freehold 
 is the measure of this difference ; and yet the freeholder will 
 hardly bring himself to admit and understand that what he 
 calls a freehold ground rent is but leasehold in its value ; that 
 the freehold which he let became by action of the lease de- 
 preciated to mere leasehold in the rent that it commands ; 
 and that for this lessened worth of his commodity he has 
 the fiction of an ultimate reversion, which, even to his heirs, 
 when two-thirds of the term has lapsed, will hardly be of any 
 value. He has deprived himself for sixty years at least of 
 something like a quarter of the value of his property'. He had 
 a good commodity to sell, spontaneously he made it bad, and he 
 is then obliged to let it at a corresponding under-price ; and all 
 for an ideal gain so far remote that a mere peppercorn insur- 
 ance could suffice to represent it. His financial loss is thus 
 immediate and absolute ; but besides this loss, he has for the 
 remainder of his life the care of supervision, of collecting
 
 10 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 rents, of law contingencies, of architectural dilapidations, of 
 insurance policies, and of the many incidents that happen, 
 unforeseen, to property secured on leasehold houses. His 
 ' estate,' instead of heing a relief from care, is quite a busi- 
 ness ; he must then entrust it to a lawyer's keeping, and with 
 equanimity receive and pay the annual bill. 
 
 All this is new to many lessors and lessees. To make 
 the matter plain, suppose a freeholder has two adjoining 
 plots of land, equal in size and value. One plot is his own 
 in fee, at his complete disposal ; but the other is in trust, 
 and can be onl}^ let on building leases. On this second 
 plot ten houses, worth six thousand pounds, are built, the 
 ground rent being ninety pounds a year for ninety j^ears. 
 The former plot, worth also ninety pounds a year, is sold, 
 at twent3'-five years' purchase, a fair customary valuation, 
 for two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds (.^'2,250). 
 The interest, at five per cent., on this amount is one hundred 
 and twelve pounds ten shillings (^6112 10s.), which is one 
 quarter, twenty -two pounds ten shillings (i'22 10s.), more 
 than the ground rent of the corresponding leasehold plot. 
 This latter sum gives therefore the decrease of value that 
 the lease has caused. Allowing that from wear and tear 
 and change of fashion the ten houses will in ninety years 
 depreciate so little as one -sixth, the freeholder's reversion 
 at that distant date will possibly be worth five thousand 
 pounds. Putting then aside the equal ninety pounds per 
 annum in each case, the two transactions are represented to 
 the freeholder in one plot by the twenty-two pounds ten per 
 annum increased income, and in the other b}' the long deferred 
 reversion, which the compound interest tables say is worth, 
 in theory, some twenty-two weeks' rent, but which, in fact, 
 for sixty years to come has no commercial value. It is ' dor- 
 mant,' but the annual twenty-two pounds ten are 'active,' 
 and of present and continual value ; and if this excess of in- 
 come and its interest be constantly invested in good five per
 
 UIir.AN LEASEHOLDS. 11 
 
 cent, securities, tliej^ -uill in ninety years amount to six and 
 thirty thousand pounds (i*3G,000), seven times the value of 
 the so much-prized house property reversion. Or if all the cur- 
 rent income were employed judiciously in trade, at only ten 
 per cent, net profit on mere annual returns, the * reversion ' 
 NYould amount to upwards of a million (£1,195,200). The 
 freeholders' reversion, then, is very dear ; the man who sells 
 his freehold is the wise financier; and trusts prohihiting a sale 
 are hindrances to wealth. 
 
 But when two-thirds, or thereabouts, of ninety years has 
 passed, and the slow, gradual increment of fortune comes, 
 how seldom and how little do the owners find themselves the 
 better for their long-expected good. In almost ever}' case the 
 property has been negotiated or encumbered, turned to some 
 account by way of fines or premiums or mortgages, or any 
 of the methods that the law provides for eating up the land. 
 Besides, after some ninety ^-ears or more of use and of ex- 
 posure houses will show age and wear. They were not built to 
 last beyond the term, nor yet designed for comfortable human 
 occupation ; but, for the most part, they were planned to suit 
 the fashion and the folly of the day. The fashions having 
 changed, the houses lose their character for style ; they are 
 old fashioned, and are accounted quite inferior. "Whole neigh- 
 bourhoods become neglected, and forsaken by the well-to-do ; 
 and, notwitstanding lawyers and surveyors, sink into a hope- 
 less state of squalour and dilapidation. They are then called 
 * rookeries.' Thus in every period of its course, in its prepara- 
 tion and its consequences, leasehold tenure is a noxious system, 
 and the transmutation of the freehold is in every w\ay an 
 injury to the proprietor. 
 
 But building speculators are, like leasing freeholders, the 
 victims and results, if they are also agents, of the leasehold 
 system. These poor men are seldom destitute of merit ; they 
 are probably indifferent workmen, who, by force of character 
 and exceptional capacity for supervision and control, have
 
 12 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 been advanced in their own sphere to some position of com- 
 mand. They are invited to become leaseholders; and, stepping 
 confidently and with eagerness into the stream of speculation, 
 frequently from sheer inexj)erience, and before they are aware, 
 they lose their footing and are carried downward by the stream, 
 perhaps just floating for a while, but almost sure to be at 
 length submerged. The process has a hardening effect, and 
 many a London speculator has, not merely once or twice, 
 compounded with his creditors. The bankruptcies and ' com- 
 promises ' by one generation of the speculating builders about 
 London are, it has been said, more numerous than the men 
 themselves. We seldom hear of speculating builders who 
 have been remarkably successful, but occasional!}^, after lives 
 of care and scampish work, they make, perhaps by some mere 
 accident, what they esteem a fortune ; or more probably they 
 sink in middle age, exhausted, out of sight below the lowest 
 level even of a leasehold tenure. Would that their works 
 might follow them ! 
 
 Of course, considering the ill repute and risks of speculating 
 leasehold work, few prudent men of capital will seriously en- 
 gage in it. The business, therefore, is almost entirely left to 
 needy men, who, as they build, immediately charge the car- 
 casses with mortgages and loans, involving costly and un- 
 necessary deeds. Thus it occurs that speculating builders are 
 so grievously oppressed by law. Besides, in modern leases, 
 there is now a customary clause, requiring that all demises, 
 under-leases, and assignments, which include the mortgages 
 and charges, shall be registered and copied by the freeholder's 
 solicitor, who is to receive on each occasion some two guineas 
 as his fee. New houses frequently remain for twenty years or 
 more negotiable and encumbered ere they settle down into the 
 hands of individual proprietors ; and by the fees and costs on 
 a suburban leasehold the solicitor may make, for years, an 
 income greater than the freeholder's gross rental. 
 
 With the speculating builders should be classed their wan-
 
 UEBAN LEASEHOLDS. 13 
 
 dering workmen, artisans and labour sub-contractors of the 
 lowest kind in character and quality of work ; ' field rangers ' 
 they are called. Not one quarter of the working builders about 
 London are efficient ' tradesmen,' worth their wages. All the 
 rest are sjDoiled, or have been grievously arrested in develop- 
 ment by sub-contracting and the present architectural and 
 leasehold systems. These poor men accept from their em- 
 ploj-ers the discovered measure of the ' public taste ' and need, 
 and do their work appropriately. Speculating builders will 
 provide such workmanship as they can get ; but they can 
 hardly care to do good work for people who habitually show that 
 this is not the thing they want, and that it is, in fact, beyond 
 their understanding and appreciation. 
 
 Here, then, we liave a second numerous and wide-spread class 
 perverted and used up by this pernicious system. When the 
 public execrate their painful leasehold houses their chief outcry 
 is against the speculating builders ; but these builders are not 
 half as much to blame as their accusers, who, without these 
 men, it seems, would have no houses to complain of. Specu- 
 lating builders are but a result of public foll3\ As a class they 
 are not culpably successful at the public cost, nor are they so 
 beholden to mankind that they should sacrifice themselves 
 to architectural philanthropy. Their object, quite legitimate 
 according to the public will, is to contrive as many houses as 
 they can within a given frontage, then to make these houses 
 stand awhile, and then, with careful promptitude, to sell them. 
 The superior public, who are taught to think that architec- 
 ture ' as a fine art ' is the only fitting subject for their con- 
 templation, and that cordial acquaintance with the simple art 
 of building, and with building artisans, is 'low,' when they 
 experience the result of their absurd neglect, are disappointed, 
 injured, irritated, and in their dismay they blame the specu- 
 lating builders, who are only instruments ; they never seem to 
 recognize the real cause of their affliction. 
 
 Now let the truth be known : with all the great defects of
 
 14 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 modern lionses and the multiplied delinquencies of builders, 
 these men will, in all things that concern the domicile, bear 
 fair comparison with the occupants themselves, who are 
 absurdly ignorant of everything connected with the scene of 
 their domestic life. The thing that, more than any other, 
 must affect their comfort and their health, they never under- 
 stand. They trouble all the world with their complaints, instead 
 of thoughtfully considering why they suffer, and determining 
 to get complete and permanent relief. 
 
 And yet the public also may be well excused. The lease- 
 hold custom has been no invention of the present generation ; 
 they were all born to it, and are constantly debilitated by its 
 influence. Leaseholds have denied them some of the most 
 grateful sentiments and fortifying circumstances of domestic 
 life. To occupy a freehold house confers upon its owner 
 a peculiar sense of freedom, clears his mind of vanities, 
 and gives him, consequently, force of understanding : it 
 induces firmness and stability of character, and sets around 
 a man a healthy limit to his aims, if he is wise enough to 
 recognize it. He has naturally an habitual, sympathetic 
 interest in his house which makes it his delightful care ; and, 
 consequently, by a noble and expanded selfishness, he rises 
 to be home and house-proud, and in habit self-respecting. 
 ' Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiment 
 in a people than the large and free character of their habi- 
 tations. The Middle Age architecture and its spacious and 
 lofty rooms, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of 
 English middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and. 
 freer existence, and were a sort of poetic cultivation ' (John 
 Stuart Mill). 
 
 Such was the character of life on freehold tenure ; but of late, 
 on leaseholds, men are never free in sentiment or elevated or 
 enlarged at home. Their ' mean ' houses are a gathering of 
 torture chambers, and they enter them with the habitual 
 instinctive expectation of removing at the earliest opportunity.
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 15 
 
 * Bees, b}' the instinct of nature, do love their hives, and birds 
 their nests ; ' but men can have, b}' nature, no instinctive love 
 for leasehold houses. Every house appears, indeed, a thing to 
 be avoided ; and each tenant feels that what he calls his house is 
 not a home, but something made for * style.' It was not made for 
 him, nor can it be : he is unsettled, apprehensive, constantly 
 expectant, never satisfied. The consequence has been that every 
 year there is increased mobility among the London population. 
 Their full average length of residence in one house is not three 
 years, and this, in houses of the middle class, is now the 
 ordinary length of term for occupants' agreements. Houses 
 are got up to look, to superf5.cial ejes, superior to their rental ; 
 showing that a studiously constructed falsehood is considered 
 an advantage. A similar pretentiousness is carefully main- 
 tained in equipage and furniture, that everything may be in 
 keeping; and the tenant thus asserts his vain position in 
 the world. Speculating builders see all this, they learn to 
 know their public, and are quite prepared to please them. 
 They discover that their customers are seldom satisfied with 
 a substantial and convenient, unpretending house, in which 
 the income of the occupant might with propriety be econo- 
 mized, and his display would be within his actual means. 
 The builders see that just the contrary of this is tlie ambition 
 of the world, and that if some men have the gift of self- 
 respect above the customary reverence for wealth, this class 
 is not the one on which they must reh'. They consequently 
 build their houses for the public as they find them, and these 
 houses are, in architectural character and show, fair repre- 
 sentatives of popular desire. 
 
 Thus the system is continually acting and reacting on 
 the public, and on the houses the}' inhabit. It induces 
 flimsy-mindedness ; men fatuously accept the evil which by 
 leasehold tenure they are made to sufl'cr, and their domiciles 
 reflect the weakness and the want of individuality of those 
 who occupy them. The result is perfectly well known. Though
 
 16 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 it is said that one half of the world can hardly know how the 
 remainder live, a long experience in London does enable some 
 to form a tolerable estimate of the condition of its sad and 
 quiet-looking people. Certainly a large proportion live from 
 hand to mouth, and very frequently beyond their means. 
 Commencing with a perfectly ' genteel ' idea of themselves 
 and of their suitable requirements, they wear their spurious 
 gentility, a robe of Nessus, all their lives. It is the 'elegant' 
 and showy leasehold house that starts them on their lifelong 
 painful and unfortunate career. 
 
 Under such circumstances some device of false economy is 
 needful to maintain appearances; and cleanliness and comfort, 
 children's education, even health, are sacrificed. The house, 
 so stylish, and not built for common people of domestic habits, 
 needs much cleaning and attendance ; but these things can 
 be dispensed with. Every year there is a greater general 
 neglect of household decency. Tenants live, for their three 
 years perhaps, in constantly accumulating dirt, and then they 
 take another house, fresh cleaned and painted, where again 
 they stay till filth and its results compel another move. We 
 are informing those who do not know the state in which the 
 other half of London live. The house, they say, is kept in 
 order for them ; and repairs of damage done by ill-conditioned 
 occupants are now by custom made 'the landlord's business;' 
 everything must be provided for the tenant, who, in house 
 affairs, is treated as entirely helpless and incapable, at once 
 a baby and an imbecile. 
 
 This coddling has a very bad effect upon the personal and 
 domestic habits and the social sentiment of men and women. 
 When so overcared for, people are induced to care but little 
 for themselves. The ' husbands ' are above, or possibly be- 
 neath, the manly household duty of inspecting plumbers' 
 work and drains. The ' housewives ' also, occupied with 
 elegancies, find efficient household work and care unsuitable ; 
 and fevers, typhoid, and diphtheria are allowed to decimate
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 17 
 
 their families. Besides, the house in sanitary matters is not 
 separate from the furniture that it contains, nor this, again, 
 from clothing and the family that wear it. Thus the danger 
 cannot be restricted to the architectural structure of the house : 
 it pervades everything ; and ^Yhen reports of fever epidemics 
 and of variola cause alarm, it will be well to notice how 
 these virulent disorders are engendered and promoted. 
 
 But there are more than architectural and sanitary matters 
 influenced by this tenure : intellectual growth and mental 
 character become injuriously affected. People will employ 
 their minds on their immediate surroundings, if not wisely, 
 owing to obstructing circumstances, then absurdly, with the 
 natural results. Under leasehold tenure men and women are 
 protected from responsibility — deprived of it, would be more 
 accurate — concerning the most influential object that affects 
 them. In the fabric of their house they have no worthy 
 interest ; their attention, therefore, is transferred to the light 
 cares of furniture and dress. The consequence of the entire 
 withdrawal of the dignified and permanent abode from social 
 and domestic care is an unnatural levity, which demonstrates 
 itself in ' fashions ' and their imitations. Everything in out- 
 ward life becomes a triviality, and character receives its 
 stamp from trivial surroundings. Self-respect is thus di- 
 minished, and social reverence is lost. The result through- 
 out society has been the ostracism of the stronger minds and 
 the promotion of the weak and vain. Excessive worthlessness 
 of every kind in dress and furniture is evidence of this inver- 
 sion ; and the public, having lost their natural leaders and 
 their individual judgment and good sense, make tradesmen's 
 novelties in ' fashionable ' rubbish matter for intense desire, 
 extravagant expenditure, and lifelong social competition. 
 
 On the other hand, the uncontrolled possession of his free- 
 hold residence endows the self-respecting man with social 
 dignity. He is a local personage, perhaps a power, having 
 local interests which lead to local public duties. AYhen thus
 
 18 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 territorially settled, men know one another, and discover 
 who should lead in secular affairs and who should follow ; 
 special aptitude for work and for administration becomes 
 recognized and properly applied ; and as each house erected 
 by its own proprietor upon a freehold site is prett}^ sure to 
 be a sound, substantial structure, the result of constant 
 effort at improvement, such endeavour and experience natur- 
 ally give the architectural culture needful for the proper 
 management of public works. With such homely, customary 
 house-building there would be no abject deference of ignorance 
 to clever experts ; people generally would understand what- 
 ever might be recommended for the public good, and would 
 themselves see clearly how it is to be obtained. 
 
 But some may say that business is so urgent, and its regular 
 engagements so engross their time, that the}^ have none to 
 spare for architectural diversion. True enough, no doubt, 
 particularly when these persons are successful, and are rising 
 in the world. But what is business that it should be so en- 
 grossing? What need is there for the constant urgenc}^? 
 As business men report, their occupation is not so entirely 
 healthy that no change and no relief could be desired. They 
 say — we quote from varied and extensive testimony — that the 
 trades, and even the professions, are but few in which a 
 scrupulous regard is shown for genuine, as distinct from legal, 
 honesty. It really seems then that seme little intermission 
 might be advocated, and accepted by the saner portion of the 
 world. A wholesome change of occupation might improve 
 the moral tone, and possibl}- revive the spirit of our business 
 men. Their thoughts are evidently gloomy even at their most 
 exhilarating times ; their aspect is indeed a constant strain 
 on iDity and commiseration. Where, for instance, can be 
 seen a show more dismal than the range of faces at a feast 
 of some great City Company ? The people are all evidently 
 men of business, and, besides, are leaseholders. 
 
 The tenure is not the disgrace and plague of any special
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 19 
 
 class. All ranks are injured by it : the nobility and West 
 End residents as well as City clerks and working men. All 
 suffer in domestic comfort; but to those whose state and 
 dignity are held to be their great distinction leasehold influ- 
 ences must be specially obnoxious. To have lost the amplitude 
 and individuality of a town house, and to be numbered in a 
 row of compo-fronted slips of leasehold work, to be the subject 
 of a common building speculation, with its transient fashions 
 and vulgarities, is not consistent with the notion of an ancient 
 aristocracy. The change from Grosvenor Square to Grosvenor 
 Place is like an abdication of nobility. A nobleman till 
 lately had a ducal residence between the river and Tra- 
 falgar Square ; the House has been pulled down ; the site 
 has been converted into * frontages ; ' and now his Grace 
 finds shelter in a narrow leasehold tenement that faces a 
 cross road behind the Queen's back garden. 
 
 The effect of leaseholds on the working classes is, however, 
 of more consequence than loss of dignity ; it tends with them 
 directly to disease, to dissipation, and to death. At least one 
 half of London houses are unfit for human beings to reside 
 in. All the rooms are made so small that any locomotion 
 in them causes injury to walls, partitions, furniture, and 
 fixtures. Everything becomes dilapidated, roughly worn, and 
 consequently dirty. Then, their houses being sorry imi- 
 tations of the homes of richer people, those who labour, 
 thinking such display to be distinguished and correct, en- 
 deavour also, in their sordid way, to imitate their betters 
 in their household goods and dress. Thus everything about 
 the families and homes of working men is now a travesty 
 of the pernicious follies of the middle class, as these again 
 are imitators of the social ranks above them. People do not 
 spend their money to secure convenient healthy homes, but 
 to appear to be above their sphere, to be acquainted with the 
 fashion, and to assert their right and interest in the foolish 
 custom of the day. The cost and outlay that all this requires
 
 20 THE ETHICS OP 
 
 are quite sufficient to reduce the circumstances of the people 
 from financial affluence to habitual penury ; and this is 
 actually its effect. The money that might build or buy an 
 unj)retending, spacious, well-constructed house is spent in 
 worthless ' elegance ' and ornament ; and the small, ill-venti- 
 lated hired rooms are crammed with cumbrous furniture and 
 finery that make habitual cleanliness and health impossible, 
 and phthisis has become the national disease.* 
 
 In such 'rooms,' quite inappropriately named, two millions 
 of the London population are compelled to pass their lives ; 
 and the effect upon the social habits and the moral character 
 of men and women is deplorable. A man and wife can live 
 perhaps in quiet in these little dens ; but when the family 
 begins to grow, and childi'en multiply, and move and play, 
 as children do, the father finds himself a surplusage at home, 
 and goes for peace and quiet to the public-house, to join his 
 fellow-sufferers from leasehold tenure. There he, of course, 
 must drink, and then the habit comes, and grows. The com- 
 pany is not select ; the man, if tolerably educated and 
 intelligent, meets numbers who are otherwise ; and he must 
 make the best of, or become the worse for, his companions. 
 To invite a chosen, well-conditioned few to his own home 
 would be absurd. He has no home : the place is but a cup- 
 board, or is possibly a stye. In one small room all culinary 
 and domestic operations must be carried on ; the men would 
 therefore be entirely in the way : or if there is another cupboard, 
 called the best front parlour, all its little floor is occupied by 
 quasi-fashionable table, sofa, easy-chair, and chiffonier, the 
 necessary demonstrations of gentility ; and not a yard of 
 width is left for movement and for social comfort and com- 
 panionship. 
 
 The women, who are left, and are supposed to be at home, 
 are possibly still greater sufferers : they never get fresh air. 
 
 * In London there are every year some twenty thousand deaths from chest 
 disease.
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 21 
 
 The slightest ventilation in such little rooms is felt as a cold 
 draught ; and doors and -windows are, as far as may be, kept 
 hermetically closed. The children either turn into the streets, 
 and live in dirt and license there, — leaseholds provide no 
 playgrounds, — or, if they are retained at home, they sicken, 
 pine away, and die. The woman's health gives way, and 
 as she is alone to do the household work it is not done ; 
 the filth accumulates, and then the public - house becomes 
 •again a refuge or relief. Both man and woman have lost 
 hope and energy, and home repels them. They have no 
 idea of acting for themselves, or of discovering what would 
 most improve their state at home. The house is not their 
 business but the landlord's, and all houses for the working 
 class are much the same. It is * their lot,' and they accept it 
 listlessly and sink into depravity. 
 
 Youths also, of both sexes, are habitually driven from home. 
 They naturally seek society, just as ' their betters ' do ; but in 
 their houses they can never find it. They must wander there- 
 fore, and all wholesome family restraint is consequently lost. 
 Parental discipline is scarcely thought of or regarded; parents 
 neglect their duty of command, and the young people, quite 
 untutored in obedience and self-control, find in saloons and 
 ' schools for dancing ' most efficient schools of vanity and 
 vice. 
 
 The great concern that has of late been manifested by the 
 upper classes for the benefit of working men, and the alarm 
 that is so frequently expressed at the increased consumption 
 of intoxicating drinks, together show that the condition of the 
 working classes in their homes is little known or understood. 
 Intoxication as a habit is a common consequence, a natural 
 result, of undersized, unwholesome rooms ; and not the lower, 
 but the middle and the upper classes are the fabricators and 
 maintainers of the leasehold system, which denies sufficient 
 home accommodation to the poor. These classes ai'e the 
 2-eal culprits in the case of metropolitan intemperance ; and to
 
 22 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 them, mncli more than to the working men themselves, the vice 
 and misery of drunkenness are due. The working men have 
 yet to learn the method of their misery ; when they 
 attain this knowledge, and have also learnt the lesson of 
 Co-operative Stores, they will promote societies to build 
 on freeholds only, and will look for public sympathy in their 
 determined, just repudiation of the modern leasehold system 
 of house tenure. 
 
 There is a general, vague idea that because large freeholders 
 appear to have some slight control, a better class of houses is 
 erected under leasehold tenure than would be the case if each 
 man had his separate freehold. It is hardly necessary to 
 argue out this question : the result of this insuring system is 
 around us, and the inhabitants of London are, for their wealth 
 and culture, the worst housed population on the globe. No- 
 where in Europe can be seen such lines of paltry houses, with 
 such cribs of rooms ; and never was a people similarly subject 
 to a landlord's interdict, prohibiting, by means of physical 
 obstruction, ordinary social and domestic intercourse. 
 
 Two generations back, when urban leaseholds had become 
 the rule, there still remained an old-established institution that 
 afforded some relief. The parlour at the public-house was then 
 the regular resort of heads of families and young men of the 
 middle, tradesman, class. There politics were talked and 
 parish business was discussed, and there the French were va- 
 liantly defied, the slave-trade was denounced, and parliamen- 
 tary reform was carried. There each company of sturdy boon 
 companions, mostly sons of yeomen, sat and talked through- 
 out the evening, with high argument ; and if at times their 
 logic was defective and their information incomplete, they 
 had the benefit of manly intellectual intercourse, and their 
 bright mother wit was exercised and sharpened. These strong 
 men, although a fragment only of the population, gave a tone 
 of vigour to the public mind which cannot be expected from 
 a generation who throughout their lives have been shut up
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 23 
 
 apart in little boxes Tvitli their wives and cbildren. Very 
 likelj' after twelve the argument would be a little clouded, 
 though the talk and the tobacco would be hindrances to tip- 
 pling rather than inducements to excess. But now there is 
 no general opportunity for intellectual and social intercourse ; 
 the public-house is but a dram-shop, parlours are unknown, 
 there is, in fact, ' no house,' but only what is called a bar, 
 where men and women go all day to stand and drink, and 
 drown the memory of their miserable homes. 
 
 The richer classes can have no idea of the powerful influence 
 that narrow houses have on working people. They, by their 
 wealth, can keep themselves sufficiently removed from con- 
 tact with their own domestic architectural surroundings, 
 which indeed are, practically, distant from them, suites of 
 wide and lofty and well-lined enclosures ; and, if all is not 
 agreeable, the upholsterer has ample opportunity and scope 
 for his devices. But for the working man there is at home 
 no intermediate distance, and no space for such appliances of 
 furniture for ease and comfort. In his sitting room a table 
 and two chairs take all the width between the fireplace and the 
 opposite partition wall, and when the chairs are occupied the 
 room is full. Nor can the workman have the change of resid- 
 ence and scene that richer men afford when houses are not 
 altogether to their mind. He is directly, and without relief, 
 in constant contact with his house, which is no choice of his, 
 and is by no means his ideal, but in which he suffers daily. 
 A most foolish custom has condemned him to this grievous 
 home imprisonment for life. 
 
 The lower middle class are sufferers in much the same way 
 as the workmen ; and, to escape the pressing evil, clerks and 
 superior artisans and little tradesmen, who compose so large 
 a part of the suburban population, leave their homes and lose 
 their time and health and money at the billiard-room, the 
 tavern, and the music-hall. This is the secret of the great 
 expenditure on drink, a sum that in ten years would buy up
 
 24 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 every London ground-rent ; and until this fact is understood 
 no valid diminution of the drinking hahits of the people 
 can be hoped for. Yet no session passes without some en- 
 deavour to enact prohibitory laws against the liquor traffic ; 
 the promoters overlooking the important fact that those who 
 drink are masters of the situation, and that they alone, 
 by a reform of social habits, possible on freehold tenure, can 
 restrict, and even stop, the trade. If their ordained, legi- 
 timate enjoyments are denied to men, they will of course 
 obtain some vicious substitute. In milder climates men can 
 live in public in the open air, and consequently suffer little 
 from small pieces or (qypartements ; but in London such 
 extensive freedom is impossible. For ten months in the year 
 all social meetings must be under cover, and as people cannot 
 make their little cupboards serve as ' rooms,' they meet else- 
 where. The crowds that gather round the gin-shop doors 
 towards one o'clock on Sunday show the natural result : 
 as long as London houses are not made for men, men 
 will avoid them, and will go where they have space and 
 light and company and welcome, and they then must drink. 
 The custom does not lessen with increased intelligence ; it 
 constantly advances. The more highly strung the nervous 
 system of a man, the greater his imaginative power, and the 
 more his mind is cultivated, the intenser is his sensibility to 
 his misfortune : he can see no prospect of relief, and so he 
 gets a temporary change. Hence the increase of drinking, 
 as distinct from grovelling drunkenness ; and thus the lower 
 middle and the working classes, as they rise in income 
 and intelligence, spend more and more in liquor. We are 
 furnished with the trade statistics of a j)ublic-house frequented 
 by these people, and it seems that in the last fifteen 3'ears the 
 trade profits have increased five-fold, without a single new 
 house in the district. 
 
 There have been many efforts to establish reading-rooms 
 for working men ; but reading-rooms are palliatives only :
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 
 
 or^ 
 
 those who make these efforts will admit that they themselves 
 would not be satisfied with such poor substitutes for homes. 
 A month's experience of ' Institution ' life would perfectly 
 suffice to show the value that 3'oung men and women set on 
 public-houses of this kind. They soon discover that such 
 education as they most require is not to be obtained in 
 reading-rooms, but in the circle of their families and friends 
 at home. It is the want of such home education that sends 
 half the population to the taverns and saloons ; the other 
 half lament such painful error, but they stiil maintain and 
 help to propagate the cause of all the evil. 
 
 The outcry for the opening of museums and the theatres on 
 Sunday is due chiefly to the want of spaciousness in urban 
 living rooms. The people are domestic, fond of home, and 
 naturally hospitable; but these virtues are on leaseholds 
 specially forbidden. To be social, * given to hospitality,' the 
 great majority of Londoners must get away from home ; they 
 can have no 'church in their house,' tbey must 'forsake the 
 assembling of themselves together ' — quite a different thing, 
 it may be here explained, from modern church attendance 
 — and they ' treat' their fellows at the tavern bar; or in the 
 reeking gin-shop, or the beer and brandy tea-garden, seek such 
 enjoyment as excitement and indifferent companionship will 
 give, in place of all the dignified and solid comforts of a home. 
 
 And here, again, the higher classes scarcely understand the 
 popular demand. They need no galleries or museums to 
 amuse them on a Sunday ; their own rooms are large enough 
 for social intercourse, and so they see their friends at home, 
 a thing the working man is not allowed to do. His Sun- 
 day seldom is to him a day of happiness and rest ; he gets no 
 quiet, has no real relaxation and but miserable change. In- 
 stead of doing work he suffers irritation, and to avoid this 
 suffering he systematically leaves his house and family, and 
 ' breaks the Sabbath.' 
 
 An intelligent observer will perceive how greatly this un-
 
 26 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 happy state of life and morals may be traced to the outrageous 
 disregard of human nature in the first formation of a young 
 man's home. The lower animals, birds, beasts, and fishes, are 
 superior to Londoners in household dignity. They don't take 
 leases, and with them the speculating builders are unknown ; 
 they start in life with building operations of their own ; their 
 house is made in preparation for their family. In London, 
 IDeople are like hermit - crabs, content to shuffle into some 
 ill-fitting, cumbrous, unconformable, rejested shell; and 
 there they make their ' home,' ridiculous to every beholder. 
 The leasehold system is a chief material cause of the im- 
 provident and thriftless habits of our working classes. It pre- 
 vents the natural formation of considerate and x)rudent plans 
 for life ; and men rush into matrimony, not perhaps too early, 
 but before they have prepared themselves, by systematic self- 
 control, and by the active self-respect induced by strictly 
 economical expenditure, for the responsibilities of married 
 life. True, there are Savings Banks ; but a ' deposit ' is to 
 many a numerical abstraction. Working people do not see 
 it, therefore do not love it, and in consequence too quickly 
 sacrifice it for some visible absurdity w'hich for a moment 
 charms them. There should always be a worthy and imme- 
 diate object for the workman's savings, something to be seen, 
 and which can thus secure his interest and devotion. A young 
 workman, when the term of his apprenticeship expires, or 
 earlier, should everywhere have opportunity, by weekly pay- 
 ments, to secure a visible investment in an urban or suburban 
 freehold of his own. The saving, prudent habit once begun 
 and formed, is apt to grow% increasing with his age. Young 
 women, too, should know that if they save, instead of spend- 
 ing all they have in finery, they also may contribute to the 
 purchase of their future home. This would be possible if free- 
 holds were at hand and easily procurable ; but if the only 
 method to secure a house is either to become a speculator in 
 a bastard tenure, or to buy a rickety, dishonest place of misery,
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. i^7 
 
 a compound of the Pozzi and Piombi and the Bridge of Sighs, 
 with every association of discredit and of disrepute, j^oung 
 men will hardly practise self-denial to attain so pitiful an end. 
 No man is intelligently proud of any leasehold house; he may 
 have some mean pride in its pretentiousness and paltry show ; 
 but if he has good sense and sensibility he feels the thing to be 
 an illegitimate production, crooked and false in character, and 
 he despises it. If occupants of leaseholds could imagine, even 
 for a moment, that the houses were their own in fee, the thought 
 would give them an astonishing experience of mental dignity. 
 How much more powerful for good would be the actual fact 
 that they were freeholders. 
 
 The effect of leasehold tenure is particularly manifested in 
 the quality and stature of the London population. Separat- 
 ing recent importations and mere summer visitors, there is 
 a large residuum of weakly, nervous semi-dwarfs. A fairly- 
 built pedestrian going eastward from Belgravia to St. Luke's 
 or Bethnal Green, will, if observant, notice, or at any rate 
 will feel, that as he goes he rises by comparison in animal 
 physique. He seems to be a Saul among the people, and, 
 without a thought, to add a cubit to his stature. But a 
 country family for two generations subject to the influence 
 of London houses obviously recedes towards the state of 
 pre-historic and primordial humanit3\ If men are played 
 upon by their environment, and those who are the fittest 
 constantly survive, we have the philosophic reason for the 
 undersize of genuine Londoners ; they suit themselves to 
 then- habitual abode, and in their generations the}'' become 
 homunculi by reason of their little homes. In intellectual 
 and moral power there seems to be a similar decrepitude : of 
 native Londoners it is remarkable how few comparatively are 
 distinguished men. The cause of the deficiency is clear 
 enough ; this leasehold tenure, with its cellular constructions 
 and bad air, has naturally an enervating influence on the 
 brain. Thus, when referring to an accident at Kensington,
 
 28 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 Mr. Frank Buckland writes : ' The crowd stood like a lot of 
 marble statues ; nobody offered to move, or say, or do, or 
 suggest anything. Upon my word, I think an English crowd 
 is very selfish or exceedingly stupid.' Mr. Buckland's sharp 
 alternative was needless ; any London crowd may be entirely 
 what he suggests. But this is their affliction, for the vicious 
 circle makes itself complete. By leasehold influence the in- 
 tellect is weakened and sinks into dull selfishness ; it thus 
 becomes incompetent to recognize the cause of its affliction 
 and to undertake the cure. 
 
 This mental weakness manifests itself not merely in the 
 general absence of superior men, but by a wide-spread dis- 
 regard or want of scrupulous financial honesty. Those who 
 have special insight into the domestic life of London families, 
 and know more than the w^orld at large about their income 
 and expenditure, can give a curious account of their condition. 
 A proportion, whether large or small we will not say, though 
 it is fairly calculable, are careful people, and habitually 
 honest, but the rest proceed upon a constant system of in- 
 debtedness. Young men who seldom fail to spend their 
 money quite as quickly as they earn it, marry on their in- 
 come, and expect, without a thought of calculation, that 
 enough will come whenever more is wanted. The proceeding 
 is not limited to any rank of life, but we will take in illustra- 
 tion the abundant class of clerks, commercial and professional, 
 whose time is spent in most elaborate contrivances to prevent 
 one set of ' Christian ' gentlemen from cheating, or from being 
 cheated by their fellow-Christians. Under present business 
 circumstances these poor men are commonly condemned to 
 life-long drudgery with little pay. Considering the kind of 
 work they do, the pay, compared to what is given to accom- 
 l^lishfcd artisans, is quite sufficient, and they might live well on 
 it, with comfort, in a simple way. But they must live, it seems, 
 'like gentlemen ; ' their wives and daughters, too, are ' ladies,' 
 which, interpreted by them, means people not accustomed to
 
 UEBAN LEASEHOLDS. 29' 
 
 associate with the working classes. The distinction may to 
 some extent be justified. For centuries ' society' has severed 
 manual labour from intelligence, and denied it social equity 
 and personal respect. The lower middle class are therefore 
 prudent in their way when they endeavour to dissociate them- 
 selves from people in a state of permanent inferiority. Posi- 
 tion is especially important to the class which finds itself at 
 the immediate edge of the established platform of respect- 
 ability. A broad-cloth suit, soft hands, a house that has a 
 kitchen quite distinct and separate from sitting-rooms, and the 
 employment of a servant girl, however small and inefficient, 
 are the strict essentials of a Londoner's gentility. A few men 
 of the clerkly class may gain j^romotion in the business worlds 
 but of necessity the great majority remain in their ambiguous 
 condition, with an income on a par with that of decent artisans, 
 but with pretensions quite above the level of these common 
 peoi)le, who are workmen. 
 
 Ranks in the scale of income differ, but in each the impulse 
 of gentility is much the same. Incomes are often fixed, but 
 fears and aspirations are unlimited and fluctuating ; and ex- 
 penditure is apt to follow feeling more than calculation. 
 When the spirit of gentility has taken hold of men and 
 women, peace of mind escapes, desire is paramount, benefi- 
 cence becomes almost or quite impossible, and honesty is 
 honoured as a name. A clerk sees little in the business system 
 of the present day to make him think that practical regard 
 for other people's rights and property and interest is any 
 mark of wisdom, or a thing that can with credit be avowed. 
 He has been taught to make things safe, and for security to- 
 disregard the scrupulosities of rectitude. Success, according 
 to the world and just within the law, is the great aim ; and 
 Christ's example and the golden rule are ampl}' recognized by 
 audible assertion of a creed in church on Sunday. 
 
 In almost every house in London there are evidences of the 
 mental degradation that this tenure constantly occasions.
 
 30 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 Furniture and fittings, works of art, and even dress, are all 
 unworkmanlike and inartistic, or ' artistic,' wliicli is worse, 
 and fashionable, which is worst of all. The more a room is 
 furnished ' in the modern taste ' the worse it is. The motive 
 and idea of modern furniture are vanity and affectation, and 
 it seems that for the present every one must yield to these to 
 some extent, or have no furniture at all. But what is very 
 arievous is the fact that all this failing so reflects the 
 public mind. The intellectual deficiency, the epidemic moral 
 weakness, clearly evident in occupants of leasehold houses, 
 is indeed well understood and recognized by men of trade, 
 who learn to know their customers. The very language 
 and address of shopmen show what characters they have to 
 deal with, and each newspaper contains a page or more of 
 businesslike mendacities, which are well known to pay. The 
 public catch at them ; they promise more than what is right, 
 and that is what so many people hope to gain. Of course 
 they are deceived, and all the furniture and fiddle-faddle in 
 their homes, intended to impress the world with their fictitious 
 wealth, or 'taste,' or elegance and fashion, only show their 
 great deficiency in character and sense. 
 
 This unnatural and strange condition of so large a popu- 
 lation has still further evil consequences. A deficiency of 
 independent thought, of individuahty, and of social power; 
 a habit of regarding public questions as mere themes for 
 newspapers and subjects for home gossip, not involving 
 personal responsibility and duty ; and, as it seems, a compre- 
 hensive incapacity for corporate combination and develop- 
 ment, and for collective will in action, mark the character of 
 Londoners. They are a people spread abroad upon a terri- 
 tory, leaseholders, without enduring interest in the place, and 
 seekino- none ; a huge outspreading multipede, invertebrate 
 and headless. 
 
 During the last twenty years there have been frequently 
 before the public schemes for the municipal self-government
 
 UKBAN LEASEHOLDS. 31 
 
 of London ; all of them superficial, dealing with the popula- 
 tion merely, severed from the land, and so without regard for 
 permanently local interests. Such schemes would scarcely do 
 substantial good : for large and permanent success the free- 
 holders should undertake the primary requirements of a 
 neighbourhood, the laying out of roads and streets and sewers, 
 and gas and water works. Of these things leaseholders and 
 tenants have a temporary user only, and are therefore, natur- 
 ally, seldom zealous for their liberal development and sound 
 construction. Public parks and plaj-grounds, viaducts and 
 bridges, baths and libraries, are still less likely to engage 
 their serious care. They may, perhaps, after much painful 
 talk, be glad to get these necessaries for themselves ; but 
 they have no long-sighted, generous prescience and local states- 
 manship, which looks beyond the little space and time that 
 parish vestrymen can compass and appreciate. 
 
 The reason for this failure is the w^aut of full proprietary 
 interest. Apart from a few isolated Land Societies, there 
 are not in all London probably a thousand men who live 
 in their own freehold houses : other freeholders are few, and 
 mostly public bodies and non-residents. The poijulation ge- 
 nerally are mere tenants, often in the third or even fourth 
 degree, on terms extending from seven days to twelve months 
 and three years. Commercial buildings, and most dwelling- 
 houses rated at above three hundred pounds a year, are leased 
 or underleased for seven years or more, the tenant doing all 
 repairs ; but the pernicious system of agreements for a shorter 
 term is rapidly extending upwards in the scale of rental. 
 
 Thus the general population is a mobile element, and not a 
 stable mass, and but a small minority take an}^ active part in 
 parish business. These are the vestrymen, who hold as lease- 
 hold property a large number of the smaller London houses, 
 and who often make it their chief business to prevent, and not 
 to undertake and forward, necessary public works. The street 
 paving, hghting, and road-making are directed by these people ;
 
 32 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 and the state of the small thoroughfares, in Clerkeuwell and 
 Shoreditch for example, shows that leaseholders are not a 
 class to he entrusted with the interests of the public, or even, 
 when there is a need for generous consideration, with their own. 
 The conduct of parochial affairs is left, however, to these little 
 tradesmen, and to speculating builders, and a few surveyors 
 and solicitors of the same inferior grade. These men, the 
 lower quality of popular intelligence, promoted to transactions 
 much beyond their usual experience and to duties far above 
 their comprehension, are the local governments and admin- 
 istrators of the largest and most wealthy city in the world. 
 
 For more than forty j'ears there has been lamentable want of 
 a conservative, foreseeing care for public works in London. A 
 full quarter of a century after the necessity for arterial drain- 
 age, for the Thames Embankment, and for the Holborn Via- 
 duct, had been obvious to all the world, these works at 
 length were undertaken; a whole generation having been 
 denied the use of them, and left in needless danger and dis- 
 comfort. Each work is, for a metropolis, an ordinary under- 
 taking, save indeed in its excessive costliness and show. The 
 Embankments are inferior in length to those of a provincial 
 town in France, and yet they have been made to look ab- 
 surdly self-important and pretentious. The new Viaduct is 
 level, which is all that could be wanted ; but besides it is a 
 monument of coarse expensiveness, with a ridiculous pretence 
 of patronage of art. The citizens of London make the Via- 
 duct a demonstration of their wealth, and of their want of 
 wit to use it. 
 
 Before the first Eeform Bill, London and its environs re- 
 ceived from every Government imperial and judicious care. 
 It then was evidently understood that highways were a public 
 need, and should be planned with forethought for extended 
 local intercourse. On both sides of the Thames the town was 
 girt by a succession of wide avenues, laid out with generous 
 judgment, that refused to spoil a great improvement for the
 
 UKBAN LEASEHOLDS. 33 
 
 sake of some minute economy. North of the river the Com- 
 mercial Eoacl, the City and New Eoads, the New North Eoad, 
 the Seven Sisters', Camden, Caledonian, and Finchley Eoads, 
 and Highgate Archway ; and on the Southwark side, the Kent 
 and Dover Eoads, and all the avenues that radiate from the 
 Surrey Obelisk, are like * imperial works, and worthy kings.' 
 But since the Government has lost its healthy despotism 
 scarcely a mile of thoroughly suburban road, apart from 
 public parks and promenades, has been laid out as a main 
 public thoroughfare. Streets at the rate of fifty miles a year 
 have been constructed, not as thoroughfares however, but as 
 * frontages,' and with regard alone to each small plot of land 
 which is described as an ' estate.' There is no thought about 
 the gradients and continuity of roads and streets, or of an 
 avenue or great highway. The only things considered arc 
 the rentals and the Building Acts. Suburban London is a 
 tangle of small streets that lead to nothing but the score or 
 two of houses in each line of frontage ; and in many places 
 for a mile each way no leading and continuous thoroughfare 
 occurs. The Board of Works, a delegation from the parish 
 vestries, is engaged in rectifying crooked corners and ex- 
 tending narrow lanes in central, close-built London ; but, 
 while all this little work is going on, the great suburban dis- 
 tricts, owing to the habitual neglect and want of circumspec- 
 tion of the Board, are constantly supplying them with further 
 opportunity for opening needful avenues, through finished 
 neighbourhoods, in the most expensive way. Instead of care- 
 fully anticipating the advance of building work round Lon- 
 don, and providing broad and leading thoroughfares in all 
 directions, everything is left to chance, or to the smallest 
 and most selfish interests ; and the Board, M'ith all its ped- 
 dling and expensive works, is falling year by year more dis- 
 tantly behind the public need. They even fail to guard the 
 public rights which Parliament a century ago had granted. 
 Thus, the Acts for the formation of the road from Eaddington 
 
 3
 
 34 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 to Finsbury provided that no houses should be built within 
 fifty feet of the road. On the abolition of the toll-gates it 
 was enacted that any building within this limit should be 
 treated by the parish vestries as a common nuisance, and 
 removed. This, during the existence of select vestries, saved 
 the open space, but on the passing of Hobhouse's Act the 
 little tradesmen, wishing to increase the area of rating, tacitly 
 permitted the encroachment of, first, unsubstantial and then 
 solid structures, in advance of the original building line. 
 The Board of Works has now to be applied to for permission 
 to build over the front gardens. This permission is, on some 
 parts of the line, habitually granted ; and throughout, wher- 
 ever dwelling-houses are converted into shops, encroachments 
 are continually made. For anything the Board of Works or 
 any local board has done, there will be lost to London the 
 important right of an extended open space as large as a 
 suburban park, and the continued opportunity for making 
 what might be the longest, finest boulevard in Europe. 
 
 The reason of it all is Leasehold Tenure. The inhabitants 
 of London have no pride or satisfaction in the place ; they 
 only wish to make their fortunes by its help, and then to get 
 away from it as soon as possible. But why not move at once ? 
 Of the four millions who inhabit greater London not a thou- 
 sandth part have any permanent, substantial interest in the 
 land or buildings. The whole population suffer from an evil 
 custom which some hundreds only are persisting in to their 
 own hurt, not knowing why, and which they never care to make 
 the subject of inquiry. Each year the population, in sheer 
 misery of home existence, is, as we have said, becoming more 
 unsettled and inclined to move ; and in a few years' time the 
 tendency of men will be nomadic. As it is they live in booths 
 that scarcely can deserve the name of houses. Their best remedy 
 will be migration : let them, having learnt the cause of all their 
 suffering, decide by acclamation to remove, and quit the place 
 entirely. The proprietors can still retain their piles of half-
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 35 
 
 burnt clay and matchwood; and in a ghastly wilderness of 
 hollow, empty houses, they may sit at gaping doors and 
 melancholy windows, and in sorrow beg their bread as show- 
 men and joint fabricators of the biggest and the ugliest folly 
 that has been inflicted on the world. 
 
 In London, freehold property when leased, as almost all 
 the London freeholds are, is as a rule unrepresented. It pays 
 no rates ; these are all thrown upon the leaseholder, who, as 
 if in mockery, is called the ' owner,' and the occupier in the 
 first degree. There is, however, one remarkably absurd excep- 
 tion. Freeholders, who have no personal interest in the 
 population, are, by a law designed for rural property, allowed 
 to vote for guardians of the poor, whose duties are entirely 
 personal and thus by accident alone are local; but in all 
 matters having reference to public works, in which the per- 
 manent proprietors must have a special interest, this most 
 important class is totally ignored. 
 
 It is a first essential for efficient action in municipal affairs 
 that freeholders should be both taxed and represented, and 
 that, by some general and equitable system of land transfer, 
 those who are the subjects of taxation should obtain posses- 
 sion of the soil in fee. London, for instance, sliould be held, 
 as real property, by Londoners. The ultimate proprietary 
 leaseholder with more than twenty years of unexpired term 
 should have a legislative right to purchase, at an equitable 
 valuation, all superior interests, including the fee simple of 
 the land ; all titles should be registered and parliamentary, 
 and transfers should be prompt and inexpensive. Every 
 freeholder should have a vote, or two if he be resident, and 
 any severance of the occupiers from the land in fee should be 
 discouraged. 
 
 This can be done experimentally, with very little indi\ddual 
 disturbance. Of the land in London and its suburbs an un- 
 usually large proportion is in public hands. It is in fact a 
 mere security for income which the public use, and of which,
 
 3G THE ETHICS OF 
 
 therefore, the great public has the paramount command. 
 These estates of corporate bodies, livery companies, hospitals, 
 commissioners and charities, and all church property, should 
 be sold, "with preference for the leaseholder, and the proceeds 
 properly invested in the funds. The transfer would be an 
 immense relief to governing committees, with a corresponding 
 saving of administrative costs, and, as we have shown, a 
 marvellous financial gain ; the property would be more pro- 
 fitably used by individual freeholders, the amount of per- 
 sonal efficient interest in the land would be increased five 
 hundred-fold, and in an equal ratio would be the increased 
 care for beneficial public works, and the experienced intellec- 
 tual power to achieve them. 
 
 It may be said in passing that these ' charity ' estates are 
 quite miscalled ; they are not, for the most part, the result of 
 'love,' but of excessive fear. The ' pious ' donors made their 
 legacies by way of expiation for, perhaps, their lifelong want 
 of charity ; and the result is a continuance of the evil thus 
 compounded for. The constant public work of charity has 
 been forestalled and superseded by a vicious eleemosynary 
 system, and it thus occurs that, notwithstanding, or by reason 
 of its wealth, the great metropolis of England has become 
 a pauper warren for improvident and ill-conditioned people. 
 
 When the enforced proprietary change has been in operation 
 for a year or two, the public will appreciate their happy 
 liberation from the incubus of law and middlemen, and public 
 spirit will revive. The great proprietors throughout London 
 will then see that their own interests and those of the com- 
 munity are quite concurrent, and their damage also ; and that 
 the cost of agencies and law, and the depreciated value of their 
 property as leasehold, fall most heavily upon themselves ; and 
 seeing this they will, after some little self-assertion, of their 
 own accord perhaps, apply the simple remedy. 
 
 There then would be a sound constituency of freeholders, 
 possessing the intelligence, and interest, and will to scheme
 
 UBBAN LEASEHOLDS. 37 
 
 and carry into execution local and extensive public works, 
 which would make London a true mother cit}^ an example for 
 all towns in England and all cities in the world. At present 
 the reverse of this is true, and, save where Parliament has 
 intervened, the great metropolis has been and is a bad 
 example ; in good works deficient and a laggard, and in consti- 
 tution wanting vital power. As well make visitors at Brighton 
 the rate-paying constituency and local corporation of the 
 borough, as rely on the inhabitants of London, in their pre- 
 sent lackland state, for the strong, enterprising government of 
 the metropolis. 
 
 The principle of the expropriation of house property and 
 ground rents has within the last few years made demonstrable 
 progress. In 1872 it was called ' communism,' which it seems is 
 something shocking, though most people are accustomed daily 
 to the communistic use of light and air and of the Queen's 
 highway, and are not scandalized, nor sensible of public harm. 
 But it is said that purchase by compulsion of the seller is 
 a trespass upon private right. Precisely so; and man}' 
 another wholesome project equally infringes the prescriptive 
 rights of property. An area a hundi-ed times as great as that 
 of London has, within the memory of men of middle age, 
 been forced from its proprietors because the public good 
 required it ; and yet the thing was not called ' communism.' 
 Commons — a very communistic word — have been extensively 
 enclosed for the behoof of the adjoining land proprietors ; but 
 this has not been by the said proprietors esteemed a policy of 
 confiscation. Tithe Commutation Acts were thought to be 
 conservative in aim, and coi)yhold enfranchisement has not 
 been stigmatized as revolutionary. Even the control of 
 'personalty,' not real property or freehold of the soil, has 
 been restrained by legislation ; and the Betting Acts, and 
 what is called Thelusson's Act, are clear encroachments on 
 proprietary rights. More recently our timid ' communistic '
 
 38 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 critic, 'rising,' as lie says, 'above a false and narrow inter- 
 pretation of vested interests in propert}^' declares that ' the 
 expropriation clauses of the Artisans Dwellings Act are not 
 at all too sweeping for their object, but are based upon 
 a definite assumption that where public necessities conflict 
 with private rights, private rights must submit to reason- 
 able modifications. Of course this is not a new principle ; 
 for the compulsory purchase of lands under private Acts of 
 Parliament is a familiar idea to modern Englishmen. The 
 novelty consists in the recognition of the fact that under 
 certain circumstances the interest of the lowest class might 
 be the interest of the whole communit3\ The Artisans 
 Dwellings Act proceeded strictly on the apostolic maxim that 
 if one member suft'ers all the other members suffer with it. 
 The remediable grievance of one section of the community is 
 the grievance of all the rest.' Which is in fact our theory of 
 ' communism.' 
 
 All this is hopeful and judicious ; it appears that other 
 things than communism may be even less agreeable to con- 
 template ; besides, it is allowed to be ' notorious all over Eng- 
 land that no cottages are so bad as those that are cheaply 
 run up,' — on leasehold tenure ? — ' either to live in or to let, by 
 persons of the labouring grade.' To save discussion we accept 
 the statement, and reply that as the leasehold system has 
 extended and is nearly universal, its bad influence has brought 
 and keeps the standard of house-building miserably low. Even 
 on land bought and divided up by freehold land societies the 
 habits of the leasehold builders influence the character and 
 execution of the work. There is, however, on those freehold 
 land estates which are entirely covered a remarkable improve- 
 ment in the buildings. The more recent houses are much better 
 than those first erected, and these also are continually being 
 made more comfortable and in every way improved. Thus, not- 
 withstanding the great general ignorance of the building art, 
 the natural instinct of the freehold occupants compels them to
 
 UEBAN LEASEHOLDS. 39 
 
 spend time and care and money on their houses ; and the 
 trade of huilding has hccome entirely demoralized because it 
 is deprived of this instructed, zealous, personal control. True, 
 there are Building Acts and sanitary regulations, but these 
 things are actual evidence of pubHc folly and neglect, and but 
 a feeble substitute for public knowledge and opinion. These 
 Acts themselves would be more efficacious on a freehold tenure. 
 Were there only one proprietor or interest a monition could 
 be served immediately, and it Avould be zealously attended to 
 by men made sensible and wise by constant thoughtfulness 
 about their w^ell-appointed freehold homes. 
 
 Good has been attempted, and in part no doubt achieved, by 
 philanthropic individuals and societies, who have built large 
 blocks of dwellings for the artisans and poor; but this is only 
 an improvement, sometimes a mere change of evil, not a cure. 
 The buildings often are of many storeys high, to get the largest 
 population possible upon an acre of the soil, a method which 
 ignores or very much neglects the fact that light and air are 
 needful for the due support of life, and that without sufficient 
 space these cannot be obtained. The fashion has, however, 
 been distinctly set, and now the working classes may look for- 
 ward to a century of constantly increasing solar obscuration. 
 For the future, light and air will be, still further banished 
 from the streets as well as from the houses : even leaseholds 
 have not brought us to this horrible condition. The small tene- 
 ments in Bethnal Green have not a pleasant reputation, but 
 compared with a continuous neighbourhood of ' sanitary ' dwell- 
 ings they are a suburban paradise. For instance, near the 
 Hackney Itoad the streets are tolerably wide, the houses too are 
 low, and there are ' gardens,' so that the inhabitants can see 
 their copper-coloured sun, when he sometimes appears, and also 
 get some little colour of their own. But in most model dwellings 
 sun and moon will be but astronomical expressions ; the horizon 
 and the zenith will be understood as synonyms; and the young- 
 population will become mere pallid fungi, growing feebly at the
 
 40 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 bottom of their canon or their ' well.' In London, building 
 spaces should be open, not confined ; in our vast wilderness 
 we want no 'constant contiguity of shade.' Our climate is not 
 that of Genoa or Naples, and our first sanitary need is ample 
 sunlight, with its consequence, fresh, moving air. Our 
 market gardeners understand all this : they do not rest when 
 they have drained the land and regulated the manure, nor 
 do they place their shrubs as close as possible upon the 
 ground. They arrange, judiciously, to give each plant its 
 share of sunlight and of air, and even open out the centres 
 of their trees and bushes to the sun : they cherish health, 
 and, constantly observing nature's laws, they look for multi- 
 plied and healthy fruit. Our builders and philanthropists, 
 too often, it appears, regard existence only, not the joy and 
 the exuberance of wholesome sunny life : they plan for a 
 congestion of the population that will yield them five per 
 cent., and on these terms they undertake to warehouse men 
 and women. 
 
 The apartments thus provided are small, low-pitched rooms, 
 some ten feet square, with what is called ' sufficient ventila- 
 tion.' In such places even the most necessary movement of 
 the air must cause a draught. The result is evident : all 
 ventilation is, where possible, prevented ; constitutions then 
 must gradually fail, and doctors' bills will come to supplement 
 the moderate rent, and bring the cost of model lodgings up to 
 the level of substantial, spacious, freehold residences for our 
 labourers and artisans. 
 
 There is a minimum of human need in dwellings as in 
 clothes. Places and ages differ, and our model lodgings 
 might be sumptuous for troglodytes and Esquimaux, though 
 quite unsuitable for London workmen, w4io want homes for 
 comfort and not cabins to confine them. Ordinary day rooms 
 should be sixteen feet, at least, from wall to wall. The 
 fireplace and fender, dining table, with a chair on either side, 
 and room for comfortable movement, make this space im-
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 41 
 
 perative.''" In model lodgings movement is impossible, and 
 there are only ' sitting ' rooms. The sleeping rooms will just 
 contain the bed, perhaps, but not by any meaiis the necessary 
 air. The lodging-house societies mean well, and have done 
 partial good : their efforts so far are deserving of the public 
 thanks. But first endeavours seldom perfectly succeed ; and 
 those most gratefully inclined would fail to thoroughly ap- 
 prove of a benevolent association of slopsellers who should 
 offer cheap and well-made clothes invariably undersized, or, 
 for our latitude, as limited in wholesome shelter as the earliest 
 garments that we read of. 
 
 It is impossible that a few men, or even many, should 
 assume the care of house supply for millions of the London 
 working classes. 'During thirty years, up to 1875, private 
 efforts, including those of Lady Burdett Coutts, Sir Sydney 
 Waterlow, and the Peabody Trustees, had housed only 2G,000 
 persons, not a great deal more than half the number which is 
 yearly added to the population of London.' In the work that 
 has been thus accomplished much habitual evil is avoided, 
 and the buildings certainly are genuine and honest. But they 
 are essentially commercial speculations, made, most properly 
 as such, to pay a moderate percentage. This, in household 
 practice and econom}^ is, however, most distinctly inhumane. 
 A house should never be a thing of commerce to its occupants. 
 It should be made a generous sacrifice to their well being, 
 physical and moral ; and thus, sacred in its character and 
 dedication, it would become an object of affection and respect 
 and loving care. 
 
 * There is about the inner life of a humble home a some- 
 thing one may almost say of sanctity, which is not so 
 apparent, at all events on the surface of things, in splendid 
 mansions. Tlicir splendour, somehow or other, seems a 
 
 * A plan of ' an American cheap cottage,' lately i)ublisliotl, shows a 'living 
 room' sixteen feet by eighteen, with a kitchen nearly half this size adjoining. 
 All quite proper, natural, and freehold.
 
 42 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 matter of course : it is taken for granted both by those who 
 witness it and by those who possess it. It is transmuted 
 money. There is no poetry ; if hearts are moved by it, it is not 
 in that fashion or to that issue that it touches them. Quito 
 different is it with the humble home. There every object seems 
 to have a pleasing history. The care that is taken of it tells 
 you how hard it had been come by. You read in it a little 
 tale of the labour, the frugality, the self-denial expended on 
 its acquisition. It is a revelation of an inner life which you 
 are the better for contemplating and sympathizing with ' 
 (Rev. F. Barham Zincke). 
 
 Many proprietors have spent large sums in what they think, 
 and certainly intend to be, the improvement of small cottage 
 property on their estates ; but in the great majority of cases 
 they, like the societies, have only made a change of evil. 
 Our old houses were constructed well, according to the habits 
 of the people, and allowing for the state of sanitary science at 
 the time. Thus, when a conflagration was required to clear 
 the wealthy town of London of the plague, the cottages of 
 labouring men would hardly have attained to hygienic excel- 
 lence. They were, however, built to live in, and the working 
 men who planned and built them made the comfort, as they 
 understood it, of the inmates their sole aim. The outer walls 
 were thick, the openings small; the thatch was ample, thick, 
 and overhanging, keeping out both heat and cold, and throw- 
 ing off the rain. The rooms were tolerably large, but low : in 
 those days height would probably appear to labouring men un- 
 comfortable, and would in winter seem to make the rooms feci 
 cold. Their betters, if they did submit to loftier, larger rooms, 
 had canopies and screens, and had contrived the four-post bed 
 with heavy curtains to obtain the necessary closeness. In those 
 times the country cottager resembled his superiors in folly and 
 in sense ; but now he has no architectural individuality at all : 
 the labourer has no personal control or interest in the build- 
 ing of his house. Some inexperienced draughtsman plans a
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 43 
 
 cheap arrangement of small cells, with nine-inch outer walls 
 to let in cold and damp, and a thin roof of slates and lath 
 and plaster ; just above an inch of rapid heat and cold con- 
 ductors intervening between shivering sleepers and the frosty 
 air. The essential element of these designs is ' moderate cost,' 
 then prettiness of elevation. Comfort and space, security 
 from heat and cold, the very object of a house, are quite 
 secondary matters, and in most cases seem to have escaped 
 attention. There has, however, been of late much care for 
 family morality, and so the moderate-sized bedroom is divided 
 by two thin partitions, and becomes three closets, or there is 
 an attic made of slate and plaster in the ,.roof. The sitting 
 room is but a cupboard, and the place is altogether fitter for 
 a kennel than a home. The cottagers are not allowed to take 
 care of themselves, and, in true artistic rivalry, to build on 
 their own freehold land according to the general progress of 
 intelligence, for comfort and with due regard for health, their 
 plans and work improving year by year as they gain practical 
 experience ; but the proprietor becomes a special providence, 
 and plans these little chambers so that they may bring the 
 calculated interest. His cottages are then by others, and 
 himself perhaps, esteemed to be a boon to working people. 
 What the labourers who occupy them say and feel is quite 
 another matter ; their opinions are not asked, and seldom 
 are their wishes and desires consulted. 
 
 To those who have immediate observation of the present 
 system it is clear that leasehold tenure is the cause of the 
 increasing badness of all building work. The greater showi- 
 ness of modern houses is but a screen or cover-misery. Each 
 3'ear there is more architectural displa}', and yet more mean- 
 ness. The idea that workmen undirected should reform our 
 system of house-building does perhaps to people of the pre- 
 sent day appear absurd ; but probably they do not recollect 
 or understand that the old houses which were built so * large 
 and free ' as to become ' a sort of poetic cultivation ' were
 
 44 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 contrived aud built by workmen, and that modern leasehold 
 houses, ' mean and cramped externals,' are designed by 
 ' architects ' and those who imitate their method. We have 
 given to working men the suffrage, and they vote in liberty 
 on our political affairs ; might we not also set them free to 
 build, with genuine artisan intelligence, their own and other 
 people's houses ? 
 
 Society is often well intentioned, and has shown much 
 patronizing interest in working men. But, in the midst of its 
 benevolent career, society may well consider whether it is equal 
 to the task of building proper houses for the whole community 
 of workmen. After such consideration they will probably be led 
 to seek some method by which workmen may themselves secure 
 the first necessity of civilized humanity. The poor man's 
 house, for instance, might be held as freehold, like the rich 
 man's railway, and be made convertible as easily as railway 
 stock and Three per Cents. These things could be done, if 
 peojDle of the upper classes had distinct perception and a 
 favourable will ; but here they fail. They are exclusive, as 
 they say, conservative ; and by their long infliction of bad laws, 
 and their support of evil customs, by the cost and intricacy and 
 delay of legal transfers, and by the sad maleficence of leasehold 
 tenure, they have kept, and still they keep, the working classes 
 alienated from the soil, and in a state of degradation. We are 
 often told that land is free, is not ' tied up ' by any statute. 
 This is only subterfuge. The rich who tell us this can pay the 
 fcinall proportion of law costs upon their own large purchases ; 
 but they are negligently, if not of set purpose, willing that 
 the working classes shall be mulcted in a heavy fine — not less 
 than ten per cent., and frequently much more — if they, in 
 their small way, intrude on the great territorial preserve, and 
 seek to hold, or traffic in, the soil in fee. This all, in feeling 
 and in fact, should be entirely changed, and everything that 
 hinders small investments in house property and freehold 
 land should be removed, that men may spend their money
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 45 
 
 without hindrance on their freehold homes, and malvo them 
 the chief exhibition of their frugal industry, and of their 
 -wealth, in money, in imagination, and in common sense. 
 
 And now that we have carefully discussed the leasehold 
 system, have described its evil influence, and have pointed 
 out the safe and only cure, we may refer appropriately to the 
 interests of art. House building by the people is the first 
 great opportunity for art, and houses for the working classes, 
 built, and designed in building, by the working men them- 
 selves, have always been its elementary, progressive school. 
 Of architecture as an art the public are entirely ignorant. 
 There is some small scholastic and still smaller antiquarian 
 knowledge, which gentlemen occasionally demonstrate at 
 Institutes and Architectural Societies. With such persons 
 architecture is a luxury, a 'fine art,' for superior people to 
 design and criticize; and to amuse these people, and the 
 public who accept their dicta, millions annually are spent 
 in travesties of art. On every other question that affects 
 their daily lives it is supposed that Englishmen are apt to 
 form an independent, practical opinion of their own : the art 
 of building then, should hardly be excepted. They reproach 
 the ' architectural profession,' not discerning that their own 
 neglect of homely art has made this counterfeit profession 
 possible. Were the public in like manner to abstain from 
 ordinary reading, and then pride themselves on their superi- 
 ority to literary knowledge, this would be regarded as absm-d. 
 Yet men who may for years have little use for literary gifts 
 have daily need of building, and are subject to its influence 
 for good or evil. As the public grow more wise, they will re- 
 pudiate vain ignorance of building work ; they will at all times 
 recognize its dignity, and with delight they will appreciate its 
 value and its power. 
 
 All men of sense and sympathy will spend their money in 
 some way at home, and the first care of every man should be
 
 46 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 to imderstaud the fabric of bis house. To go beyond, and be 
 a virtuoso in the arts of Italy and Greece, when everything 
 is barbarous at home, is an absurd neglect of opportunity. 
 In popular domestic architecture with a systematic freehold 
 tenure, art, constantly employed in combination with utilit}^ 
 would be enduring, dignified, and reticent. Men's intellects 
 when occupied about such work would be ennobled, and the 
 house itself would every year be so improved as to command 
 the higher price spontaneously offered for judicious and artistic 
 work, superior to fashion. 
 
 On the other hand the leasehold system is, in art, in policy, 
 and in all things that affect the character of men, an obvious 
 injury and failure ; and it must ere long be superseded. The 
 substantial tenure that will take its place is nothing new 
 or complex, but the earliest, the simplest, and most dignified 
 on record. Abraham, although a stranger, would not ' take ' 
 Machpelah even as a gift, he bought it as a burial-place, and 
 David equally repudiated an uncertain tenure. Our fine 
 medieval buildings were on freehold land, and art has wholly 
 perished from the scene of leasehold tenure. If we return to 
 unsophisticated freeholds art will certainly revive ; each house- 
 holder will seek to make his home more beautiful and excellent, 
 and by this exercise of noble care he will obtain a correspond- 
 ing increment of honour and of self-respect. 
 
 Nothing whatever has been said, or can be said, in rational 
 defence of leasehold tenure. It is a custom wholly destitute of 
 merit, and without beneficence. It is alike injurious to the 
 freeholder, and to those who build, and Wuy, and rent the 
 houses, and inhabit them. It degrades the moral tone and 
 spirit of the people, it prevents municipal reform, it is a con- 
 stant and increasing injury to the workmen and the poor, and 
 in poetic building art the whole of London is its pattern card. 
 Is, then, the system worth preserving ? 
 
 The lawyers may be first appealed to for a merciful reply. 
 Their antiquated and unkindly artifices have bewitched house
 
 URBAN LEASEHOLDS. 47 
 
 property, and, in compassion, tliey might now resolve to set 
 it free. Those who most largely deal with iirhau leaseholds 
 will acknowledge all the evil that we have, with prudent re- 
 ticence, described, and will, it may be hoped, devise and 
 publicly promote the remedy. The age is one of law reform, 
 and there are legists of supreme capacity to undertake the 
 work. If such reformers will examine the three Acts for Copy- 
 hold Enfranchisement '■'• they there will find the form and 
 details for a bill to liberate all urban Corporate, and Church, 
 and Charity estates from leasehold bondage. Mr. Gladstone's 
 Irish Land Act,t and the simple forms for mortgage and con- 
 veyance used by the Irish Church Commissioners, would 
 supply additional suggestions for the scheme. For method 
 and completeness, Mr. Coote's achievement in the Fines and 
 Piecoveries Abolition Act:]: would also be an excellent example. 
 The profession will not grudge so politic and generous a 
 change, but, on consideration, will most gladly welcome it. 
 Although their business costs on leasehold property are large, 
 the gain is not a recompense for the discredit, wholly un- 
 deserved, and for the purposeless responsibility which ' lease- 
 hold' lawyers and conveyancers continually suffer. And, 
 besides, these gentlemen well know, by practical experience, 
 that cumbrous documents and heavy costs are 'in restraint of 
 trade.' Stockbrokers would account their occupation hopelessly 
 oppressed if, for their simple transfers and their small com- 
 mission of one-eighth per cent., there should be substituted 
 various quasi-legal documents, with parchments, and instruc- 
 tions, and attendances, and fees, and corresponding charges. 
 Lawyers are scarcely less discerning than financiers : they 
 will be the first as a profession to repudiate the leasehold 
 system, with its cares and complications and its ill repute, and 
 will, as a Conservative reform, promote its gradual and com- 
 plete extinction. 
 
 • 4 and 5 Yict. c. 3:3 ; lo and IG Vict. c. 51 ; and 21 and 22 Vict. c. 91. 
 t 33 and 34 Vict. c. 4G. ; 3 and 4 Will. lY. c. 74.
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, 
 
 PRINTERS, 
 
 CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
 
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