THE HOUSING QUESTION 
23 
The Minister of Health in the debate in the House 
of Commons, on 21st July, 1921, when the Government 
stopped their housing scheme, said :— 
" Our needs are very much what we want to make them. For 
instance, possibly we should all like to live in a very much better 
house than we have got." 
One feels that such a sentiment, if the Minister would 
advance it at a meeting of slum-dwellers, would greatly 
relieve their discontent and would enable them to 
realise that even Sir Alfred Mond has to live in a house 
which is not nearly as good as he would like. Mr. 
Pecksniff could not have put it more clearly. 
And, after all, have we not grown into the greatest 
nation in the world without all this molly coddling ? 
Did not our population pour forth from the garrets 
of Bethnal Green, the back-to-back houses of Leeds, 
and the tenements of Glasgow, to do battle with the 
Hun, and did we not win the war ? 
What do our people want with gardens and porches, 
and parlours ? Baths ! They are only used for coals 
and cauliflowers. Drains! They generally involve 
smells : better do without them as our fathers did. 
Our needs are only what we make them. 
These great “ wens " of England, as Cobbett called 
them, with their strength belching forth out of their 
chimneys and lying like a pall between the blue vault 
of heaven and the children of men : these human 
warrens where stand the houses of massed humanity, 
40 or 50 to an acre : close and neighbourly no doubt, 
and handy to the factory and workshop: these, says