The pipes needed for all sanitary purposes will be
cut and sold; the handles of doors and the brass-work of taps will be
cut away; every scrap of wood-work available for fire-wood will be
stolen sooner or later, and the people will relapse steadily into a
state of filth and recklessness to be paralleled only among Australian
and North American aborigines. Which of the sentimentalists has ever
travelled to America with a few hundreds of Russian and Polish Jews,
Saxon peasants, and Irish peasants from the West? That is the only
experience capable of giving an idea of what happens when a
fairly-fitted house is handed over to the tender mercies of a
selection from the British "residuum." I shall be accused of talking
the language of despair. I have never done that. I should like to see
the time come when the poor may no more dwell in hovels like swine,
and when a poverty-stricken inhabitant of London may not be brought up
with ideas and habits coarser than those of a pig; I merely say that
shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. They
are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars
for the use of ferrets.
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