We forget that before laws are abolished they have generally been inflicting evils more or less serious; some for a few years, some for tens of years, some for centuries. Change your vague idea of a bad law into a definite idea of it as an agency operating on people's lives, and you see that it means so much of pain, so much of illness, so much of mortality. A vicious form of legal procedure, for example, either enacted or tolerated, entails on suitors, costs, or delays, or defeats. What do these imply? Loss of money, often ill-spared; great and prolonged anxiety;frequently consequent illness; unhappiness of family and dependents; children stinted in food and clothing -- all of them miseries which bring after them multiplied remoter miseries. Add to which there are the far more numerous cases of those who, lacking the means or the courage to enter on law-suits, and therefore submitting to frauds, are impoverished; and have similarly to bear the pains of body and mind which ensue. Even to say that a law has been simply a hindrance, is to say that it has caused needless loss of time, extra trouble, and additional worry; and among over-burdened people extra trouble and worry imply, here and there, break-downs in health with their entailed direct and indirect sufferings. Seeing, then, that bad legislation means injury to men's lives, judge what must be the total amount of mental distress, physical pain, and raised mortality, which these thousands of repealed Acts of Parliament represent! Fully to bring home the truth that law-making unguided by adequate knowledge brings immense evils, let me take a special case which a question of the day recalls.
Already I have hinted that interferences with the connexion between supply and demand, given up in certain fields after immense mischiefs had been done during many centuries, are now taking place in other fields. This connexion is supposed to hold only where it has been proved to hold by the evils of disregarding it: so feeble is men's belief in it. There seems no suspicion that in cases where it seems to fail, natural causation has been traversed by artificial hindrances. And yet in the case to which I now refer -- that of the supply of houses for the poor -- it needs but to ask what laws have been doing for a long time past, to see that the terrible evils complained of are mostly law-made.
A generation ago discussion was taking place concerning the inadequacy and badness of industrial dwellings, and I had occasion to deal with the question. Here is a passage then written: --"An architect and surveyor describes it [the Building Act] as having worked after the following manner. In those districts of London consisting of inferior houses built in that unsubstantial fashion which the New Building Act was to mend, there obtains an average rent, sufficiently remunerative to landlords whose houses were run up economically before the New Building Act was passed.
This existing average rent fixes the rent that must be charged in these districts for new houses of the same accommodation -- that is the same number of rooms, for the people they are built for do not appreciate the extra safety of living within walls strengthened with hoop-iron bond. Now it turns out upon trial, that houses built in accordance with the present regulations, and let at this established rate, bring in nothing like a reasonable return. Builders have consequently confined themselves to erecting houses in better districts (where the possibility of a profitable competition with pre-existing houses shows that those pre-existing houses were tolerably substantial), and have ceased to erect dwellings for the masses, except in the suburbs where no pressing sanitary evils exist. Meanwhile, in the inferior districts above described, has resulted an increase of overcrowding -- half-a-dozen families in a house, a score of lodgers to a room. Nay, more than this has resulted. That state of miserable dilapidation into which these abodes of the poor are allowed to fall, is due to the absence of competition from new houses. Landlords do not find their tenants tempted away by the offer of better accommodation. Repairs, being unnecessary for securing the largest amount of profit, are not made... In fact for a large percentage of the very horrors which our sanitary agitators are trying to cure by law, we have to thank previous agitators of the same school!"Social Statics, p. 384 (edition of 1851)
These were not the only law-made causes of such evils. As shown in the following further passage, sundry others were recognized: --"Writing before the repeal of the brick-duty, the Builder says: -- 'It is supposed that one-fourth of the cost of a dwelling which lets for 2s. 6d. or 3s. a week is caused by the expense of the title-deeds and the tax on wood and bricks used in its construction. Of course, the owner of such property must be remunerated, and he therefore charges 7 1/2d. or 9d. a week to cover these burdens.' Mr C. Gatliff, secretary to the Society for Improving the Dwellings of the Working Classes, describing the effect of the window-tax, says: -- 'They are now paying upon their institution in St. Pancras the sum of *162 16s. in window-duties, or 1 per cent. per annum upon the original outlay.
The average rental paid by the Society's tenants is 5s. 6d. per week, and the window-duty deducts from this 71/4d. per week.'"Times, January 31, 1850.
Social Statics, p. 385 (edition of 1851).
Neither is this all the evidence which the press of those days afforded. There was published in the Times of December 7, 1850 (too late to be used in the above-named work, which I issued in the last week of 1850), a letter dated from the Reform Club, and signed "Architect," which contained the following passages:
"Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construction of model lodging-houses by throwing two or three houses into one.
