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Title: Our Civilization
Author: Frank Kitz
Date: May 1885
Language: en
Topics: Commonweal, civilization, United Kingdom, socialism
Source: Retrieved on 30th August 2021 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/kitz/builder.htm
Notes: Published in Commonweal.

Frank Kitz

Our Civilization

In utilising the space at my disposal for this paper I do not concern

myself with advocacy of the abstract principles of Socialism, but prefer

to exhibit the foulness, discomfort and filth which capitalism inflicts

upon us in our every-day lives, and thus negatively to make Socialism

understood. The utility and justification of this gospel of discontent

is found in the patience with which the people bear the evils which the

gushing scribes of the press assure them are inseparable from “Our

Civilisation.”

One, and by no means the least weighty of the counts in the indictments

by which Socialists arraign the present system of production for profit,

is that wherein our health and lives are directly affected, viz., the

construction of our houses, owing to our infamous land system, which

robs the people of their natural inheritance and forces them into towns

; we have, especially in London, a vast increase of urban population. To

meet this artificially-created and unnatural increase, our fields, and

ere-while pleasure resorts, have been given over to the reign of the

Jerry Builder, who has disfigured them with miles of hideousness. Under

his sway, trees, grass and hedgerow disappear, the pleasant wayside

brook becomes a noisome sewer, villages are reached, swallowed up and

passed. What few characteristics of their once rural environment remain,

only stand as sad mementoes of a simple past, and soon degenerate into

slums. Over the poor man’s common the Jerry Builder casts a greedy eye,

and thereon builds his shoddy houses for the shoddy City plutocrat, who,

true to his instincts of shop, designates the few starveling

soot-beladen stalks which his friend the Jerry Builder has allowed to

remain around his house as the “Grove” “Shrubberies,” “Sylvania,” etc.

The poor mourn the loss of their open spaces, once within a stone’s

throw of their homes ; the Sunday walk in the fields is now replaced by

a sojourn in the sweltering gin palaces. Wages are falling, rent is

rising, and the railway trip to the country is out of their reach. As

the circle widens and the oxygen-giving trees and grass recede before

the march of the invader, and are replaced by smoky chimnies, sulphurous

brickfields, and dust-heaps, so does the atmosphere of the huge city

become vitiated and enervating, the poor penned and overcrowded are

literally asphyxiated, and killed by hundreds through the lung diseases

set up by these causes. Glorious civilisation ! how apropos are the

burning words of Rouget De Lisle in the “Marseillaise,” “They mete and

vend the light and air.”

The Press, actuated by the same benevolent principles toward Land

Jobbers which prompts their articles in favor of colonial emigration,

advise the working class to seek “fresh air” by living in the suburbs

and renting those “Desirable Residences “ constructed by the Jerry

Builders.

The evidence given before the Commission to inquire into the Building

Acts throws a clear light on the manner in which our suburbs are run up.

Dr. Tripe, medical officer for Hackney, deposed that he knew whole

streets and roads that were built upon foundations composed of the filth

and refuse of dust-bins, the soil having been excavated to a depth of

ten feet or more and replaced with the refuse from dust-yards, and the

builder commences proceedings by announcing that “Rubbish may be shot

here.” The houses themselves were constructed with road- drift and

street-sludge mixed with inferior mortar. Anent the sludge, he explained

that it contained a large amount of sewage and faecal matter. The

general evidence was to the effect that the houses so constructed

decrease the health, and in large numbers of cases actually cause the

death, of their inmates. Many were so flagrantly bad in construction

that, despite the collusion between parish officials, landlords and

builders, they were condemned. Others saved them trouble by falling down

from their own weakness. This has happened with detached houses; when

built together, they have supported each other as two inebriates do by

leaning against each other. All this has not gone on without some

protest. Occasionally some remnant of open space, from which natural

beauty is riven, is snatched from the devouring grasp of the

land-grabber, and the public are made to pay handsome compensation for

the exercise of their own rights.

Lovers of art like Matthew Arnold and Ruskin declaim against the rampant

spoliation of Nature, and Ruskin queries whether the “Greatness of the

British Empire is as loosely stuck in the ground as are the houses of

its inhabitants.” Scientists like Richardson formulate a City of Health

and teach sanitary truths, but they reckon without their host. The same

cause, which make the filthy reeking slums of tbe central districts

“profitable investments of capitalists and others” as per advertisement

of highly-respectable auctioneers, is at work in the newer quarters.

Rent — that corner-stone of the whole system — packs humanity together

as a source of exploitation by this form of robbery. The causes of

physical and moral degration, so rife amongst us, are fast lowering the

morale and physique of the people. We are told that we are advancing in

the path of civilisation. If it involves loss of health, of happiness

and culture to us as workers, Cui bono? Time was when the homes of a

people betokened their degree of culture, when art and architecture were

allied, and were not the handmaidens of greedy speculators; when masonry

was an honourable craft, not forced to create the hideous eccentricities

which disfigure pur thoroughfares to-day. The monuments of the past

still with us prove this. If it is left to our posterity, when freed

from the rent fiend, to develop the Socialistic ideas now leavening the

mass, and to give them concrete expression in the construction of their

houses and surroundings, we may gauge the feelings with which they will

view the paltry remnants of our present ugliness, if any remain, of an

age which fostered sanitation in its hospitals and prisons, and

neglected it in its houses; gauge the ridicule they will bestow upon the

brick boxes in which we exist as the reductio ad absurdum of

individualism gone mad, of a people puzzled how to feed and house their

own poor, yet striving to force Arabs to live their lives ; and as they

till their communal lands and enjoy their communal halls, they will

bless those who now are hastening the end of the reign of Shoddy.