Capitalism has . . . always been an ambiguous process: increasing real wealth but distributing it unevenly; enabling larger populations to grow and survive, but within them seeing men only as producers and consumers, with no sub stantial claim on society except in these abstract capacities. There was thus a continuing contrast between the extra ordinary improvement of the land and the social con sequences of just this process, in the dispossessed and the vagrants, and the old, the sick, the disabled, the nursing mothers, the children who, unable to work in these terms, were seen merely as negative, an unwanted burden. To see the paradox of successful production and these human consequences would be to penetrate the inner character of capitalism itself. It was easier for men ... to separate the consequences from the system, and then to ascribe to social decay what was actually the result of social and economic growth. Raymond Williams, 19751 This article considers some of the results for the citizens of Sydney of the social and economic growth of late nineteenth century Australia. A detailed consideration of the findings of a study of slum housing in the city in 1876 is followed by a more general discussion of the urban economy in which this housing, and its associated ill health, were located. It will be suggested that the nature of the economy and the rapidity of economic growth in the period of 'the long boom'2 was such that it generated considerable poverty?poverty born of growth, and not of 'social decay'. In Australia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the question of 'the social consequences' of capitalism proved a difficult one, for it was not easy to argue for social decay in a new and expanding society. For example, the delegates to the Australian Conference on Charity, held in Melbourne in 1890, were acquainted with some of the facts of colonial destitution, but many, like Sydney's clergyman, J. D. Langley, who read a paper on 'able-bodied pauperism', found this phenomenon in 'a young country like ours' close to 'unbelievable'.3 Another Sydney cleric, describing himself as a 'Christian Socialist', argued at this same conference that 'changes must be brought about in the present constitution of society before there can be any hope of getting rid of pauperism', and that 'many of the causes of pauperism [were] to be found in present industrial and social systems',4 but he was not given a sympathetic hearing. For the most part, suggested remedies for poverty, whether radical, or piecemeal reformist, were not widely canvassed,