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No. 3.-REPORT by the FREE PRESBYTERY OF HADDINGTON AND Dunbar to the Committee of the General Assembly on Houses for the Working Classes.

In general it may be said that a very great improvement has taken place in farm cottages within the last twenty years, and that improvement is still progressing. Α large proportion of these cottages have been renewed, and all new houses have at least two apartments, many three, and some even more. On some estates there are still a good many of the old style of cottages remaining, with only one apartment, but these are rapidly disappearing as leases are renewed.

There is no such thing as bothies for ploughmen, and very few instances of ploughmen living in their master's houses. There are bothies for Irish male labourers, but these are not very numerous-the Irish in general living in houses of their own. There are, however, a good many bothies for Highland girls, chiefly during the summer, though several remain the whole year; and those bothies are in general wretched enough. The system cannot be defended in a moral point of view-these girls being entirely separated from all parental influence, and, from their speaking only the Gaelic language, are under no sessional or ministerial influences either, so far as the ministers of the district are concerned, that want, however, being supplied, so far, by the labours of a Gaelic missionary sent by the Highland Home Mission Committee. These Highland girls have come in the place of the old bondager system, and are, no doubt, a great relief to the hinds, by whom the bondager system was justly felt to be a great hardship, and over whose families it must have had a very demoralising influence. The bondage system is still carried on in several localities, but is by no means so universal as it once was. The necessity for bondagers or Highland girls arises in part from the want of a sufficient number of houses to accommodate families, but also, and chiefly, from the fact that it is female labour that is wanted; and though there were more houses there would be no employment for the men during a great part of the year.

The houses in villages and towns are of all descriptions, some good, and a great many undoubtedly very bad. In the smaller villages, belonging in general to one proprietor, the houses have been improved along with the houses on farms.

But in the large villages and towns, where there are numerous small proprietors, the improvement is not so easily effected, and some of the houses are wretched enough.

The following is an abridgment of detailed statements furnished by the ministers of various localities within the bounds of the Presbytery, and may be taken as a fair specimen of the county. The bounds of the Presbytery include the greater part of the county of East Lothian, and a small part of Berwickshire :

1. The Parish of Cockburnspath, in Berwickshire.-Three-fourths of this parish belong to one proprietor, on whose estate the houses are described "as being of the best sort-consisting of two apartments, milk-house, pantry, and an attic storeroom." There are three other proprietors, part of whose properties lie in this parish, and on whose estates the improvement is not so great; on one farm seven cottages are described as in a "miserable condition." There are three villages in this parish, one of which is a fishing village, and the houses are described as in general very good.

2. Parish of Oldhamstocks, East Lothian-This parish is the property of four proprietors. On one farm there are nine new cottages, of the same superior description as those mentioned in Cockburnspath parish. On the other farms, about nine in number, there are several of the improved sort, with a considerable number still with only one apartment. In the village of Oldhamstocks about one half of the houses of the labouring classes have but one apartment, the rest having two.

3. Parish of Innerwick, East Lothian. There are three farms on which there are no new houses, but on all the other farms new houses of a superior description have been built, most of them having three apartments, and all of them two. On one large farm there are nine new, but ten old and insufficient.

4. Parish of Dunbar, East Lothian." The cottages of agricultural labourers," says Mr. Dodds, in his return, "may be divided into three classes-1, The old and decayed, plainly unfit for their purpose and quite uncomfortable; 2, Those built about fifteen or twenty years, which, though substantial, have mostly but one comfortable room, and are otherwise insufficient; and, 3, Those built of late years, of sufficient size, with two or three rooms, and proper accommodation for a poor man's family. Most of the cottages built within the last ten years are of the latter description. So far as I have

been able to make an estimate of the number and description of the cottages on the different farms in the parish of Dunbar, I should say that the proportion of sufficient and insufficient cottages is nearly equal-the former class is about fifty-six in number, and the latter about fifty; but in both of these classes is included a number of cottages that are neither very good nor very bad, belonging to the second description mentioned above.

"In the town of Dunbar the houses of the labouring classes are, as in most similar towns, for the most part, not of a proper or comfortable description. A great number of our labouring people live in flats, or in portions of large, but old, decayed houses not originally built for such tenants; many also live in lanes and closes where the houses are huddled together within a narrow space, where there is very imperfect ventilation, and where cleanliness, within and without, is next to impossible. There is great want of comfortable and well-aired houses within the means of the working classes. The difficulty of obtaining feus on reasonable terms is said to be one chief reason why such houses are not built by speculators, or by the working classes themselves. There is also a constant influx into the town of families and individuals from the country, simply from the impossibility of finding in the country more accommodation. This produces an over-pressure of population in the towns, and leads to many moral and physical evils, while the town may be said to be over-peopled. Many of the rural parts of the parish have not native population enough to carry on the ordinary agricultural work."

5. Parish of Prestonkirk, East Lothian.-There are fourteen farm steadings, on ten of which the cottages have been entirely renewed; all of them having two apartments, and several of those more recently built having three or four, that is, one large kitchen, with three separate sleeping apartments and other conveniences, such as pantry, coalroom and milk-room; on the other four farms the cottages have been partially renewed. In the village of Linton the houses are of all descriptions.

6. Parish of Whitekirk, East Lothian.-There are about eleven farm steadings, in three of which the cottages are all new, and on improved plans; on the other eight they are either all old, or only partially renewed.

7. Parish of Dirleton, East Lothian.-A considerable part of this parish belongs to one proprietor, on whose estate for the most part new cottages have been erected, and where not already erected, it is understood that it will be done without delay. On one farm, belonging to another proprietor, very superior and commodious houses have been erected, with many conveniences. On another property the houses are described as of a very wretched description.

8. Parish of Haddington, including part of Aberlady and Athelstaneford.—In this district there are twenty-nine farm steadings, belonging to ten different proprietors. On twenty-one of these steadings, the cottages are described as in good condition, being all either entirely new or repaired so as to afford increased accommodation. On five of these twenty-one, they are described as particularly excellent. On one farm the cottages have two apartments above and two below, with milkhouse and pantry. On the remaining eight farms in the district the cottages are described as old and bad, six of the farms having particularly bad ones, and belonging to two proprietors.

9. Parishes of Salton and Bolton.-There are, including three villages, about 200 cottages in this district. Of these, thirty have been built within the last ten years, and are very good; thirty others may be designated as comfortable; the remainder are very bad, very old, small, cold, and ill ventilated. These are divided among five proprietors, of whom one has built ten new ones, another ten, and another four. The other two have done nothing.

10. Parish of Humbie. The parish includes sixteen farms. Of these twelve have had new cottages erected within the last few years, and most of them of a greatly improved description. On the other four farms some of the houses are tolerably good, and some of them very bad. In some cases where new houses have been built, part of the old ones have been kept standing to accommodate old people and extra workers in the throng season of the year; some of the latter may be called temporary bothies. Of all the new houses one only has been built expressly for a bothie, and fitted up as such, a bothie, that is to say, for Highland women.

11. Parish of Pencaitland.-There are fifteen farm steadings in this parish. There is only one steading in which all the houses are new, and these are good and substantial, with two apartments. Another steading has nearly half the houses new, with two apartments; the remainder are old and bad, with a single apartment. On a third the

houses are in good repair, but having only one apartment, with milk-pantry and coalcellar. A fourth has good houses with two apartments, but certain outlying houses belonging to it have only one, and are in bad repair. On the other eleven steadings all the cottages, with the exception of three, have but one apartment. In regard to houses for Coalminers:-At one place new houses have been built with two apartments. At another they have been repaired and heightened, and otherwise improved, having each a larger and a smaller apartment; and at a third they are but indifferent, and most of them have but one room.

12. Parish of Yester.-There are about fifteen farm-steadings in this parish, having in all eighty-five cottages; of these, only eleven have two apartments. There are eight of the farms in which some of the houses have more than one apartment with fireplace, or fitted for bed rooms. The houses in the village of Gifford are of various kinds, which remark applies to almost all the villages in the county.

No return has been received from the districts of Tranent and North Berwick, but the number of good and bad cottages are believed to hold much the same relative proportions in these districts as throughout the county. Many of the houses for the poor in the town of Tranent are well known to be as bad as can well be conceived. JOHN THOMSON,

To Dr BEGG,

Clerk to the Free Presbytery of Haddington and Dunbar.

Convener of the Committee on

"Houses for the Working Classes."

No. 4. The HOUSE ACCOMMODATION for the WORKING CLASSES in

HAWICK.

The following is the Report (abridged) read by Mr James Walker at the meeting of the FREE PRESBYTERY OF JEDBURGH on the 3d of April :— Within the last thirty years the population of the town has been doubled, and while a number of new houses have been built and old ones enlarged, still the space on which the town stands has been little increased; hence an overcrowded population and a bad sanitary condition. A large number of families live in houses having only one apartment, both in the older and more modern parts of the town, but chiefly in the former. The older parts of the town abound in narrow and thicklypeopled closes, in regard to which there is an urgent call for improvement. Every house in the town is occupied, and the want of additional house accommodation has been severely felt for the last six or eight years.

The Loan, Fore Row, Back Row, Kirk Wynd, and Mather's Close, are streets where the population is greatly in excess of the house accommodation. In some cases the inhabitants are all but packed into apartments so small that nothing but the dilapidated condition of their dwellings saves them from suffocation. In one hundred houses that were carefully examined in these streets, there are 42 single apartments below 12 feet by 14 in extent, where 347 beings live and move. 347, divided by 42, gives an average of more than 8 persons to one of these small apartments; and it is reported that in one such room fourteen individuals find a home. It is all but impossible in such circumstances that the most active and cleanly wife can preserve her house in a wholesome state. It is a wonder that life is preserved where daylight and pure air are not allowed a free entrance.

Mather's Close is a thoroughfare that is kept in the very worst condition; it is often described as a nuisance and a disgrace to the community. The close is only twenty feet wide, with an entrance from the High Street of four feet. The houses are two and three stories high, and, along with its dense population, it contains two slaughter houses, two stables, and a cow shed.

To shew the want of house accommodation, and the extremities to which an industrious population have of late been driven-there is a house in Wilton Road, which at one time was used as a joiner's shop, but at last term was considered unfit to hold a weaver's loom. It is now a home for a family. It is of a strange oblong shape, measuring say fourteen feet at the one end and tapering to about five feet at the other. Its side walls form the gables of two houses; it is roofed with felt, and has a damp

earthen floor. The rough walls are often streaming with water, and it has no proper fire-place. In Dickson Street, Wilton, there is a cellar inhabited, the only daylight that enters it comes slanting through a grated window on the side of the road. The walls are unplastered, the floor paved with rough stones, and it has no mantlepiece.

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Last Whitsunday nearly fifty families were without houses, and there was one consisting of man and wife and three children, which lived for three months after the term in a hay-loft without a fire-place. In the end of last year an addition was made to a dwelling-house, and before it was finished the proprietor had twelve applicants. In August last a person occupying a single apartment made a moonlight flitting," and within a few days thereafter there were no fewer than fourteen applications for the house. Any house that has become vacant since Whitsunday, by the death or removal of the tenant, might have been let to twenty different parties. The families who could obtain no houses for themselves at last Whitsunday endured great hardships until they found shelter in the over-crowded homes of their friends or relations. Marriages are often delayed because the parties can find no houses to dwell in, and it must be a stern necessity that makes so many young people live for a time after marriage in the house of one or other of their parents.

To shew that working men in Hawick are not only able and willing to rent better houses, but to build them if land for that purpose could be obtained,—in 1851 a number of them formed a building society for the purpose of mutually assisting each other to erect comfortable houses for their own accommodation. It was essential to the success of the society that a quantity of suitable ground for building should be obtained. Most of the ground adapted for building purposes and for the extension of the town is the property of the Duke of Buccleuch, to whom very urgent and repeated applications were made, but all to no purpose; so the funds of the society have to a considerable extent been expended in purchasing houses that from time to time came into the market, without in any material degree remedying the evil. The refusal on the part of the Duke of Buccleuch either to sell or feu ground has greatly crippled the operations of the society, and now that there is a rapid increase of the population from the extension of mills and the construction of the Border Union Railway, the want of house accommodation has become an evil of fearful magnitude, and great must be the responsibility that rests on land proprietors.

An improvement in the condition of the dwellings in Hawick, as well as an increase in their supply, would not only be the means of increasing health and domestic comfort, but of moral elevation to the working classes.

Hawick, on account of its intemperance, its Sabbath profanation, and daylight wickedness, has long stood before the eye of surrounding towns and villages as a Saul among the sinners of this generation. We know her vices, and seek not to palliate them. Still, we have a strong conviction that darker specimens of moral depravity are to be found in the hidden corners of the country.

To remove her pauperism, and regenerate her population, there is a Union Poorhouse, a Ragged School, and a missionary station, supported, to some extent, by a rich and religious aristocracy. It may be a duty to uphold that prison palace, where the wasted and the wicked find a shelter, but not a home--it may be a duty to instruct her orphan and neglected children, and to preach Christ to the very dregs of her population; but may not land proprietors, men of influence, and ministers of the Gospel conclude that they have done a great work in supporting these public institutions while the private or social arrangements under their control have been so neglected or directed as to produce the very ignorance, pauperism, and wretchedness that devour their charity? The community of alms-givers may feel a sweet satisfaction in counting the cost at which they feed so many paupers, and educate so many children, without ever thinking that the causes of these social and moral evils might be removed by improving the dwellings of the poor.

It is not in the nature of things that moral and susceptible beings can live for any length of time above the circumstances in which they are placed, and remain uncontaminated, in a damp, dark, dirty dwelling-house, where every object the eye can rest upon shocks the senses and wars against human instincts. No; in such a home vice will often grow rampant and overshadow all that is lovely and of good report among men; and it is from such homes that fell maladies unsatiated walk abroad and slay the wealthy in their selfish security. There is room for acts of charity in the world, but that is no charity that feeds pauperism in a palace, and denies honest industry a home

to dwell in. It is high time to consider if it would not be better to build roomy cottages than big workhouses-to pay honest labour than support pauperism.

No. 5.-REPORT of the PRESbytery of Dunkeld.

At Dunkeld, 27th March 1860. Which day the Free Presbytery of Dunkeld met, and was duly constituted. Inter alia,

Report of the Committee of the Free Presbytery of Dunkeld on Houses of the Working Classes and Social Morality was produced and read. The Report is as follows, viz. :-The district embraced within the bounds of the Presbytery of Dunkeld is partly Highland and partly Lowland, and the state of the working classes-chiefly farm servants and agricultural labourers-is consequently different in these two divisions. In the Highland parishes the farms are generally smaller than in the low country, and the servants on each are consequently few. There are still many small holdings, and, though the houses on these in some instances are of a very inferior description, it cannot be said that the quantity of house accommodation is deficient. Any bothies that exist are reported to be, so far as known, well conducted, and as most of them are new, there is considerable attention paid to the accommodation of the men

In the Lowland parishes of the Presbytery, Auchtergaven, Cargill, Clunie, and Lethendy, the social arrangements with respect to servants are considerably different. A good number of small farms exist, and on these the unmarried servants have usually their meals in the kitchen, and their sleeping apartment either in the farm-house, or in some out building. But the system of large farms has for some time been in the ascendant, and the greater proportion of the land is laid out in farms requiring three, four, five, or six pairs of horses to work them, and employing from five to twelve men and boys regularly, besides women and occasional workers. On each of this class of farms there are, in most cases, cottages for so many married servants, and a bothy for the unmarried men servants. There are no female bothies, so far as known, within the bounds of the Presbytery. It is the belief of the members of Presbytery in these parishes that there is pretty abundant accommodation for married servants, as, besides these cottages on the farms, houses are easy to be had in the neighbouring villages, which are inhabited chiefly by agricultural workers, not farm servants. The kind of house accommodation on the farms is, however, in many cases, not what it ought to be; but it is believed that, in respect of comfort and convenience, there is progress being made the newer cottages being better than the older. On each of this class of farms also, there is usually a bothy for the unmarried men, and the accommodation in the bothies is in many cases very inadequate. The ordinary bothy is a small, unceiled, earthen-floored apartment, with no furniture except the beds, the men's chests, and perhaps a single form. This place serves for all purposes, sleeping, cooking, sitting, &c. As often the men are the only entrants, it is generally dirty and comfortless. On a number of farms, however, there has been a great improvement on the bothies. Two or more apartments are substituted for the former room-of-all-work, each of them better than it was. The Committee are of opinion that landlords might do a great deal to improve the cottages and bothies; but they are convinced that, in so far, the wretched condition of the bothies is owing to the careless and dirty habits of the men themselves, acquired often by bad training previous to entering on bothy life. it ought to be mentioned that improvements, when niade, are not always appreciated by the men. The members of Presbytery cannot, so far as their information goes, trace many cases of licentiousness very distinctly to the bothy system, or to the want of house accommodation. But it is their opinion, gathered in part from conversation with bothy men, that the general effect of the bothy system is demoralising and degrading. The system of feeing markets, too, which prevails in the district, is demoralising and degrading in its influence. It is the general opinion of farmers and others who have long resided in the district, that the state of farm labourers is, on the whole, improving. There is less intemperance, less dishonesty, less wanton mischief than formerly. There is more reading, too, among bothy men. In some districts colporteurs, in connection with the Tract and Book Society, ply their labours with

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