80 EDINBURGH PAST AND PRESENT.
In the march of progress it was necessary to construct new streets, and erect
railway stations and public buildings. To make way for these improvements,
whole blocks of buildings occupied by the poor were swept away, and no
adequate provision was made for those whose dwelling-place had been
removed. Thus, while the demand for houses was necessarily increasing,
from the natural growth of the population, the number of houses was being
steadily diminished.
The inevitable result was that tenements already too small and overcrowded
were further subdivided ; families and lodgers were crowded into
hovels having neither light nor air nor seclusion ; the High Street, and the
lanes and alleys which extend from it on either side like so many arteries,
formed the chief centre for the working people; and many of the sober
and industrious, able and willing to pay a reasonable rent for a comfortable
house, were compelled to seek shelter in these abodes. Some
conception may be thus conveyed:-An archway four or five feet wide
leads through the breadth of the first ‘land’ into a close, not much wider,
where the houses rise story above story till the light of heaven is almost
excluded. A long, narrow, winding stair leads through darkness and dilapidation,
to what is meant for a door. Knock ; the door, hingeless and broken
perhaps, is opened, and. you are admitted with ostentatious civility. Here,
then, is a room ten feet by eight, with what seems but a hole in the wall,
dignified with the name of ‘a dark bedroom;’ the roof is cracked; the
walls bear traces of damp and rain; the window is small, and the light
admitted scarcely sufficient to reveal the faces of seven inmates,-a father, a
mother, and five children, doomed to this living death. In another apartment-
or rather over the slender partition-four children and their parents,
a son-in-law, and a lodger, who could find no other .place, live together.
The census of 1861 revealed the startling facts that in Edinburgh 121
families lived in one-roomed houses, without a window ; and that 13,000
families-not less than 66,000 individuals-lived in houses of a single apartment,
1500 of which had from six to fifteen inhabitants in each. .
Some time before the occurrence of the sad event already mentioned, a
few working men had banded themselves together, with the view of seeking
deliverance from the position in which they were placed. One evening in
the month of April 1861, six or seven masons met with a friend in a dingy
room, down a dingy close, not far from where Hugh Miller, the prince of
masons, used to write his sagacious leaders,’ and issue those chapters in his
life-history which have inspired and directed many a lowly worker in Scotland.
