Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 September 1903 — LIFE IN ENGLISH VILLAGES. [ARTICLE]

LIFE IN ENGLISH VILLAGES.

It la Mot the Idyllic Form That Poeta Slag AboaL “I know a village where there are no fewer than thirty cottages with but one bedroom apiece, and in each of these single bedrooms six, seven and more people are sleeping,” says A. Monteflore-Bruce, writing In the London Mall about life in the average English village. "In one of them, father, mother and eight children huddled together. In' another, father, mother and six children—three of whom are grown up—are sleeping. In these cpttages there is one living room downstairs and no sanitary arrangement of any kind. At the back of the cottages runs an open ditch. It Is also an open sewer. “Here, In the very heart of the country, I expect to find abundance of pure water, abundance of sweet air. Too often I find neither übout the cottages. Hundreds of villages have no water supply, though a comparatively small expenditure could provide it. I know a village—it is typical of hundreds—where the cottagers have to go half a mile to get water. A foul ditch furnishes another village with the whole of its water supply. Offensive refuse heaps lie piled round the crulnbllng walls of the cottages. The wooden floors within are rotten with sewage. “Norfolk. Suffolk and Essex contain many such villages, and other counties —such as Bedford, Cambridgeshire. Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset—easily vie with them. I could write of lonely cottages far across the fields, with no water within a mile, whence the children morning after morning walk two miles to school, and drag their tired limbs that distance back again at night —and this whatever the weather; where the postal service comes but once a week; where the men and boys walk dally five or six miles to and from work; where of drainage there is none; where of the simplest sanitation there Is none; where the medical officer of health comes not, and where the inspector of nuisances Is unknown."