Competition and Commerce in Digital Books: Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1860 edition. Excerpt: ...room, and in Church Lane, St. Giles, in a room not fifteen feet square, thirty men, women, and children were all huddled together on the floor. From an official paper on' Cellar Dwellings and Common Lodging Houses, ' we learn that in 1851 it was computed that 39,460 people were living in the cellars of Liverpool, and that 18,217 dwelt in the cellars of Manchester, the accommodation being of the most hideous and unhealthy description. Habitations still exist in our large towns which have within a year or two produced disease, death, and pauperism, which have cost society more than their fee-simple value. In these cases, again, some interference with the simple political economy laws is necessary; and it is likewise demanded in rural districts where overcrowding and indecent mixture of ages and sexes are evils added to the long distance of the wretched hovels from the labourers' place of work. Were the world governed exclusively by political economy laws, the evils detailed in the following extracts from a paper on the 'Houses of the Working Classes of Scotland, ' by Dr. Begg, would be indefinitely prolonged; but by the interference of higher laws it is to be hoped they will be speedily mitigated. But very marked peculiarities came out in connection with the rural districts of Scotland, where the most advanced farming in the kingdom and the highest rents are often coupled with the lowest state of physical comfort on the part of the working men. So uniform has this result been, that some have formed a theory to the effect, that large farms and improved cultivation are necessarily connected with human degradation. Such a theory would strike at the foundation of human progress, and cannot be true. It is found that the physical comfort of...