THE HOUSING QUESTION 79 
Slum-Dwellers (2 years later) : " Can you start 
now ? " 
Minister of Health : " We’ve stopped building 
houses, so you must stay where you are.” 
In view of this refusal of the Government to provide 
the necessary money to work the Act, it is poignant to 
read of the way people are to-day existing in Great 
Britain. 
The following is an extract from the report of the 
Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland in 
1917 
" These are the broad results of our survey : unsatisfactory 
sites of houses and villages, insufficient supplies of water, un 
satisfactory provision for drainage, grossly inadequate provision 
for the removal of refuse, widespread absence of decent sanitary 
conveniences, the persistence of the unspeakably filthy privy- 
midden in many of the mining areas, badly constructed, incurably 
damp labourers' cottages on farms, whole townships unfit for 
human occupation in the crofting counties and islands, primitive 
and casual provision for many of the seasonal workers, gross 
overcrowding and huddling of the sexes together in the congested 
industrial villages and towns, occupation of one-room houses by 
large families, groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the 
older burghs, clotted masses of slums in the great cities. To 
these add the special problems symbolised by the farmed-out 
houses, the model lodging-houses, congested back-lands, and 
ancient closes. To these, again, add the cottages a hundred 
years old in some of the rural villages, ramshackle brick survivals 
of the mining outbursts of seventy years ago in the mining fields, 
monotonous miners’ rows flung down without a vestige of town- 
plan or any effort to secure modem conditions of sanitation, 
ill-planned houses that must become slums in a few years, old 
houses converted without necessary sanitary appliances and