I grant that the condition of many London
streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see
how the desolation is caused. Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been
at work everywhere. The cistern which should supply a building cannot
be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe
have been chopped away and carried to a marine-store dealer; the
landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly
countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes' trouble. The
very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in
contented, unspeakable squalor. No--something more is required than
delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than
ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required
than sighing sentimentalism, which looks at miserable effects without
scrutinising causes. Let the sentimentalist mark this. If you
transplant a colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have
another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into
reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes
fit for brutes and for brutes alone.
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