Are there any of our readers who are not familiar, either by description or observation, with a true London alley? If so, take this picture. Imagine two lines of grimy, smoke-dried houses; the very bricks blackened and besmeared with soot and filth: imagine these towering upwards, story after story, until you can only distinguish between the projecting lines of tiles a thin stripe, a mere ribbon of sky. The pavement you tread on is slimy and unswept ; fragments of garbage; morsels of the refuse of food; cabbage-stalks; potato parings; scraps of filthy.rags are strewed about, or lying in an irregular line in the centre of the flagged way, indicating the course of the drain, which flows there towards the half-choked grating, when a shower falls, or the contents of a reeking pail of soap-suds are emptied before the door of the house in which they have been used. Look through the ground-floor windows, as you pass the half-darkened chambers, and see-perhaps through, wet clothes hung up in festoons to dry-cooking, such as it is; mangling; washing, conducted by slipshod drabs of women; while perhaps some handicraft is being pursued by a pale, unshaven man, in shirtsleeves. Crowds of squalling, shrieking, ragged children, are tumbling everywhere about; lolling over the window-sills, clustered on the door-steps, or sprawling with dogs and cats in the centre of the narrow way. Look up: clothes-lines, laden with dangling, yellow, long-worn linen, stretch from window to window, their burdens gradually getting smoke-dried in the thick unwholesome air; the windows themselves, with the glass half-smashed, and the dirty dingy sashes stuffed with fusty clothes, old hats, long ago napless and worn out, and now performing their last service, in excluding the cold air from the dingy dwelling. Half-dressed slatternly women lean from these windows, shrilly laughing and talking, and screaming out warnings and reproaches to their children beneath; the fumes of coarse food cooking, of hot water and soap worked into tubfulls of barmy lather, rise from story to story, while above, gusts of thick blackening smoke, pouring out in never-ending eddies from chimney-pots and whirling cans, come sweeping in whirlwinds down the court, pouring their " "blacks upon clothes, walls, windows, and dimming and thickening the whole murky atmosphere. It is in places like these that thousands on thousands are every year born, every year live, and every year die. These are the plague-spots of great cities-these are the very courts and sanc tuary of fever the native places of foul and loathsome pests which in the thick heats of the summer time walk abroad, smiting down youth and strength, and scarring, with furrowed traces, the once fair skin of the beauty, which they spare not. We know that in all great cities which have risen gradually and slowly, ere the principles of ventilation and drainage were attended to, there must exist narrow streets and unwholesome alleys like these. It is scarcely possible that without the recurrence of some such catastrophe as the fire of London, they could be altogether altered, and their bad quali- · ties altogether remedied. But, for Godsake, let all be done that can be done. Let in as much light and air as you can; the builder has done mischief enough-let not the tax-gatherer be called in to do more. Better it would be to put premiums on windows in such situations than taxes. There are the poor herding togethersitting, sleeping, cooking, washing, in the same chambers. This is bad enough, even were windows and air-holes everything that could be desired. But are they so? Every aperture that can by possibility let in a ray of light upon the gloom of frowzy underground cellars and dingy blackened chambers, is construed into a window. Down comes the tax upon it; and by next quarter the hole is blocked up, and the inmates may grope and gasp as they best can. We hardly know a more melancholy sight than a house with half its windows blocked up, to avoid the duty payable upon them. The mind flies from the out to the inside of such a dwellingand a dreary picture it sees there. Rooms illuminated only by an eternal twilight, not bright in sunshine-dim when a summer cloud passes-dark from the morning to the evening of the cheerless winter day; then passages, like the passages from cell to cell in gaols, where you grope, and stumble, and feel your way; staircases where your only guides are the bannisters or the wall, and kitchens like the bottoms of mines. Outside the sensation is as dismal. You look upon the house deprived of half its windows as upon a one-eyed man. The thing is unnatural. There is no cheerfulness, no lightness of expression about it. The architect may have been skilful, and the form of the fabric be graceful; but the skill has been thrown away-the grace lost. The tax. gatherer has overthrown the artist in the struggle. may Ten to one Ask a Frenchman what he thinks of our cities. the word "triste" will be in the reply; and, compared to continental towns, they are "triste." The very first thing which strikes an Q NO. III.-VOL. I. In a Englishman as he puts his foot upon the soil beyond the Channel, is the light, gay, airy appearance of the town he is landing at. The houses seem all smiles, and affability, and cheerfulness—a curious contrast to the dull forbidding dwellings he has left. moment the cause of the difference flashes on him. The windows. Aha!" he exclaims, "as our ancestors of old believed that running waters could stop the pursuit of unholy things-demons and night-riding witches-so do the salt tides of the Channel stay the progress of unholy taxes: here there is no window duty!" 66 To Sir Francis Dashwood, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer about 1762, we owe the origin of the window-tax, at least in its present shape. Before that period, a house tax existed; the manner of reckoning it was then changed, and its amount based upon the number of windows contained in each dwelling. Dashwood was a poor weak creature, a nominee of Lord Bute's: Wilkes fell foul of him in the "North Briton," and Churchill lashed him in one of his vigorous satires. It is recorded, that after his window duty feat, the children in the street-no doubt incited and urged on by their seniors-called after him as he passed along, "There goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer England has ever known." The asseveration might have been bold, but there was no more boldness in it than truth. If Dashwood and George Grenville, however, originated the light and air tax, it was Pitt who, by his immense additions to the burden, rendered it the foully oppressive thing it now is. Sixteen shillings and sixpence per window was the amount of the duty which the heaven-born minister laid upon heaven-born light and · air. Here was a proper retailing of sunbeams a petty huckstering which intercepted the free gift of God, shown to be the most free, by being the most universal of his blessings—and dispensed it to the poor at the rate of sixteen and sixpence per windowful! Food does not everywhere grow in the same profusion; fertilising rain does not everywhere fall in the same warm plenty; nurturing and fostering heat does not everywhere put forth the same strength and regenerative power; but light is everywhere, -it clothes the world as with a garment-it flows from the grand centre of the universe to its uttermost limits—it is all-pervading, all-penetrating. Through the stained glass of the cathedral, through the loophole of the prison-through broad portals and through narrow chinks it makes its way, reviving all, cheering all, blessing all. Such is light, or rather such was intended to be light. Man's legislation wars against God's designs. Man's contrivances mar God's gifts. Our firmament may be as the skies of Claude, but legislation says, our dwellings shall be as the interiors of Rembrandt! Always, unless you pay !-pay for liberty of lungs and of eyes -pay for a chance of health and strength. If you are rich you can-if you are poor, typhus will prevent you from feeling the want of either light or air. You will need no windows in a coffin! How one class of society can pay for a healthful sufficiency of air and light, and another cannot, is well exemplified in the cases of Bath and Birmingham. Bath is a city of the rich-Birmingham of the poor; the one a place of pleasure the other of industry. Bath is not now, indeed, what once it was in those ceremonious days when Beau Nash ruled the roast. Other springs have proved successful rivals to those of Prince Bladud. But Bath is essentially a town built for the rich-with all the comforts and requirements which wealth can purchase. Birmingham was built, and is every day being extended, for the lodgement of those operative classes which form the very thews and sinews of our population. The inhabitants of the one number three times the amount of those of the other; the air of the great manufacturing town is loaded with the fumes and smoke of furnaces and factories -that of the fashionable watering-place is as pure as English air can be. Under a healthy state of things, the amount of light and ventilation requisite in Birmingham might naturally be supposed to be four or five times greater than that requisite for the smaller size and breezier position of Bath. We find, however, that while Bath contributed last year 22,4087. to the window-tax, Birmingham only paid 10,9527. This is an astounding result. A city three times the size of a town built for the accommodation of the rich, with thrice the number of inhabitants, and from the very nature of the employments carried on within it, with thrice the need for thorough ventilation, possesses not above one half of the amount of interior air and light enjoyed by the smaller town. The rich man can enjoy what air and light he finds necessary for health and comfort. The poor man cannot. probably possesses the amount of interior ventilation and sunlight which every town ought to possess. Men, who can obtain what is necessary for the due enjoyment of life, generally do so. Tried then by this test-and it is a fair one-if Bath has only what it needs, how much less than it needs has Birmingham? Bath much disease-how much discomfort - how much misery-ay, how much demoralisation, must be every year bred in its dark cellars and dingy smoky chambers! As Birmingham is, so is Manchester, so Liverpool, so Leeds, so Sheffield, so Glasgow, so every one of our great manufacturing towns. There, amid filth and misery, in darkened dwellings and putrid air, do thousands annually sink before the fever pest, bred of stagnant atmosphere and reeking vapours. Sad it is that in the registrar's tables of mortality, we must trace the legitimate effects of our legislation. It is upon the poor that the burden of this bad tax, as those of so many other bad taxes, entirely falls. Because the magnates of the land can afford to pay proportionately more than the poor, our impartial rulers have called upon them to pay comparatively less. The compounding system was a grand discovery for millionaires-a fine loophole through which to shrink from bearing their share of the general load. There are houses, poor houses, of course, in the parishes of St. James's, St. Anne's, and St. Martin'sin-the-Fields, in London, rated at 167. annual rent, and assessed in the sum of 4l. 7s. 6d. for window duty! Others there are, the tenants of which pay 451. to their landlord, and 177. to the light tax. While-mark the fairness and impartiality of the arrangement-the mansion of the Duke of Devonshire, valued at an annual rental of 2500l., pays 461. of window duty; and that of the Duke of Wellington, worth an annual rent of 1850., contributes 331. Here is equality of taxation-here equal justice for the rich and the poor! But shall not such facts "Plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation" of such infamies as this tax, so foully wrong in principle, so impious in conception, so unequal and so partial in its pressure? A great effort will, we trust, be made to dash down this guilty thing for ever. Let the people look to themselves; let them put their own shoulders to the wheel; let the sufferers be their own avengers. God will help to right those who seek to right themselves. Let the motto of the agitation, we hope and trust beginning, be "Let there be light!" its end and result will be "And there was light!" In the name of common justice, and the name of common |