What is the explanation? Because the population is congested in the
city the price of land is high upon the suburbs, and because the price
of land is high upon the suburbs the population must remain congested
within the city. That is the position which we are complacently assured
is in accordance with the principles which have hitherto dominated
civilised society.

The "Poor Widow" Bogey - But when we seek to rectify this system, to
break down this unnatural and vicious circle, to interrupt this
sequence of unsatisfactory reactions, what happens? We are not
confronted with any great argument on behalf of the owner. Something
else is put forward, and it is always put forward in these cases to
shield the actual landowner or the actual capitalist from the logic of
the argument or from the force of a Parliamentary movement.

Sometimes it is the widow. But that personality has been used to
exhaustion. It would be sweating in the cruellest sense of the word,
overtime of the grossest description, to bring the widow out again so
soon. She must have a rest for a bit; so instead of the widow we have
the market-gardener - the market-gardener liable to be disturbed on the
outskirts of great cities, if the population of those cities expands,
if the area which they require for their health and daily life should
become larger than it is at present.

What is the position disclosed by the argument? On the one hand, we
have one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow occupying
one-room tenements; on the other, the land of Scotland. Between the two
stands the market-gardener, and we are solemnly invited, for the sake
of the market-gardener, to keep that great population congested within
limits that are unnatural and restricted to an annual supply of land
which can bear no relation whatever to their physical, social, and
economic needs - and all for the sake of the market-gardener, who can
perfectly well move farther out as the city spreads and who would not
really be in the least injured.