became carpenters and teachers, etc., in villages, living among the peasants and in the same manner. The consequences of the movement were much disillusionment on both sides, a certain breaking down of the social barriers, and prosecution by the autocratic government. In 1885, inspired by similar ideas, although so far as I am aware without knowledge of the Russian precedent, my dear friend of many years, Patrick Geddes, gave up his house in the New Town of Edinburgh and went to live in the Lawnmarket. He certainly lived among the people. The experiment was interesting and not destitute of a practical side; but it did not afford the vital touch of the Russian example, because the "intellectuals" did not establish organic relations with their surroundings. They revived the eighteenth-century traditions of the Lawnmarket, but these fitted in rather awkwardly with those of the close of the nineteenth.1 The conclusions which forced themselves upon all of us who engaged in the Glasgow experiments and investigations accompanying them, of which I have given an account, were in the main the following. Within the general category of the poor there is a class in large industrial centres habitually living at an extremely low level, and yet more or less content to do so. Many of this class have never known any condition other than that of extreme poverty. The instances quoted illustrate the insouciance of such people. They do not believe in miracles and they regard with amused scepticism middle-class efforts to improve them. From them I have never heard words of bitterness nor have I ever noticed in them signs of subservience. They have no conception precisely corresponding to the "class consciousness" of the Socialists; but they have very positive ideas about sharp social distinctions within their own order. For example, I knew the wife of a blacksmith who was very scornful at the suggestion that she might visit the wife of a chimney-sweep who was a near neighbour. Within the smaller group there is much fraternal feeling and sympathy in spite of occasional quarrels arising out of excessively close proximity. They lend one another freely articles and money; but they have also sharp notions of ownership, and I have never detected any indication of a tendency towards community of goods. They are rather apt to despise people who have risen from their own ranks or even from those which they recognise to be above them, while they are often very friendly with those who have never felt "the chill of poverty in their bones." Yet they are sometimes intolerant of ignorance of the social etiquette of their group when it is betrayed in forms of speech to 1 See notes on Patrick Geddes in a subsequent chapter. which they attach peculiar importance. They are also very sensitive to ridicule; and they can on occasion be very suspicious that some sinister design lies behind efforts on the part of others to improve them. Some of them would rather be left alone. I did not meet many who had dropped into the group of the "very poor" from the superior classes. Of those whom I did meet, some were quite disposed to be permanent dependants upon the bounty of sympathetic strangers, while others were defiantly independent even in extreme poverty. One striking instance of the latter order came under my notice at a Salvation Army shelter in London. He was an old man who had evidently seen better days. He made his living, such as it was, by copying music. He paid for his night's lodging at the lowest rate, viz., one penny, for which he had only a bench; he spent about twopence for his supper and apparently had a strong disinclination to be made the subject of comment or sympathy. He evidently considered that if he chose to live in that manner it was his affair. We also came to the conclusion that the labour of this group was probably, in general, below the average level of efficiency, and that therefore, other things being equal, their wages would in general remain below the average wage in their employment. Even where members of the group belonged to trade unions which insisted upon a uniform wage, their total annual earnings were less than the total annual earnings of efficient workers because of the greater fluctuation of their employment. It was thus necessary to provide house accommodation for them at a rate commensurate with their ability to pay. A higher rate would tend to exclude them. It is true that in attempting to provide the opportunity of living at so low a level we were on the one hand facilitating exploitation of their labour by their employers, and on the other contributing to their own contentment with an extremely low standard of life. It seemed to be within our power, however, to raise this standard without at the same time raising the cost of it to them and thus secure immediate improvement in their condition, leaving to other agencies the prevention of unfavourable reactions. We decided that any scheme which might be devised for the provision of sanitary dwellings at the lowest practicable rate should not only be self-supporting, but should aim at being sufficiently remunerative to draw into it or into similar projects a sufficient amount of capital to provide accommodation for the whole of the social group whose benefit was our primary concern. We also considered the question of the competition of our scheme with private enterprise, and decided that if we were able by means of supervision to diminish deterioration and by means of collection of rents by voluntary agency and the bonus system above mentioned to diminish the cost of collection, our action would tend to impose similar plans on the part of private owners of inferiorly rented property. We also hoped to give an example to them of improvement in such property and of the economic importance of improving it. In 1890, chiefly through the energy of Mr. D. M. Stevenson 1 and Mr. John Mann, Jnr., the Glasgow Social Union was founded for the purpose of co-ordinating the efforts of the various agencies then engaged in promoting social reform. An almost immediate outcome of the foundation of this union, the Glasgow Working Men's Dwellings Company, was promoted with a proposed capital of £50,000. The bulk of the capital was quickly subscribed and the company was launched. Mr. John Burnet was chosen as architect, and he and Mr. Mann at once began a careful study of the experiments in housing which had been carried out in other parts of the country, e.g. in London, Liverpool and Edinburgh. It was thought by some that the Corporation of Glasgow, which had, not altogether undeservedly, acquired a reputation for enterprise, should undertake the work proposed by the company, or at all events should co-operate with it. The corporation was, however, quite immovable and the company pursued its own course. This was a great advantage, because the operations of the company gained in flexibility and also in freedom from municipal politics. Sir James King, who had been Lord Provost and who was chairman of the Caledonian Railway Company, made an admirable chairman of the Dwellings Company. The company, which has now been in existence for more than thirty years, has undoubtedly fulfilled the modest purpose of its promotion, viz., to point by way of example towards some of the measures by means of which sanitary dwellings might be provided for those tenants who are able to pay only minimum rents. The operations of the company have been fully described in its annual reports and other publications.5 1 Afterwards Lord Provost of Glasgow and Sir D. M. Stevenson, Bart. 'Now Sir John Mann. 4 Afterwards Sir John Burnet. I had a seat on the Board of Directors until I left Glasgow for Canada in 1892. The history of the first ten years of the company is described in Sane Experiments in Housing, Glasgow, 1901. CHAPTER XIII POLITICS IN THE EIGHTIES Cleon loq. O Demus! has any man shown such a zeal, Racking and screwing offenders to ruin; With torture and threats extorting your debts; Unmoved by compassion, or friendship or shame. ARISTOPHANES, The Knights (424 B.C.). (Translated by J. Hookham Frere, 1840.) ALTHOUGH Scotsmen have borne no inconsiderable share in imperial administration, perhaps for that very reason they have not usually fallen victims to the glamour of imperialist rhetoric, and thus the imperialist movement of the seventies headed by Disraeli found Scotsmen as a rule unsympathetic. The wave of Liberalism which swept over the country in 1880 was probably due to reaction against imperialist ideas rather than to any positive policy of a novel character offered by the Liberal politicians. In the field of the technique of politics, it was due also to superior organisation on the part of the Liberal party and to defective organisation on the part of their opponents. The Birmingham Caucus was not met by equal organisation on the other side. A Tory agent told me that when Sir Stafford Northcote came down to Scotland, as he did occasionally, he contented himself with listening to reports made to him by the party agents; only when Lord Randolph Churchill made such political tours were evidences demanded of activity in registration and in propaganda. But Lord Randolph's activities were rather spasmodic, and the genial confidence of Sir Stafford Northcote was more generally characteristic of the attitude of the party leaders towards organisation. Three circumstances contributed to emergence in the late seventies of special interest in Ireland on the part of the Scots public. These were influx into Scotland, during the high-wage period of the early seventies, of a large number of Irish labourers, the crofter agitation, and advance of urban rents. The two last-mentioned brought the question of land-ownership sharply into relief, while the first-mentioned gave in certain constituencies an Irish vote which had to be reckoned with and diffused an acquaintance with the current of Irish affairs. To these circumstances may be added the presence of Irishmen in Glasgow who had acquired influence there either through their character and talents, like John Ferguson, or through active advocacy of Irish views. The question of Home Rule for Scotland had been little more than mentioned. It was never regarded with any enthusiasm, because everyone who thought about it realised that so long as Scotsmen were able to retain the share in the government of the United Kingdom acquired by them in the eighteenth century, and tenaciously held ever since, there was no real need for Home Rule. From the Scots point of view, Home Rule for Ireland stood upon a different footing. The prejudice against England which Scotland shared with Ireland in the eighteenth century had disappeared in Scotland while it remained in Ireland; and although this prejudice seemed to the Scots rather unreasonable, they thought that probably the Irish were likely to be able to manage their own affairs at least as well as the English could manage them. This view of the Irish question was re-enforced by the anti-imperialist views which, as I have suggested, were prevalent in Scotland at that time. The Irish question was thus looked upon in Scotland as partly but not exclusively an economic question, and the aspirations of a large number of the Irish people towards the erection of an Irish nation were regarded with active sympathy. The same optimism which led the Scots to discard the imperialist views of the Conservatives and to accept the vague and less positive policy of the Liberals induced them to believe that the Irish people would at once abandon their hostility to the British as soon as their nationality within the empire was recognised. In a subsequent chapter I intend to give an account of the origin and direction of the movement known at the time as the Land Restoration movement. Here it may suffice to notice that the persons who were interested in the land question were naturally much exercised about Ireland, where the land question had been thrust into the foreground by the Land League and where the root of the political difficulties seemed to lie in the system of land-ownership. The Land Restoration movement had no political influence, but it had a somewhat wide effect in stimulating interest in the land question. There was thus in Scotland in the late seventies a deep and extensive sympathy with the agitation of the Irish Land League and with the |