FFECT OF SLUMS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2488, 29 April 1909, Page 6

FFECT OF SLUMS.

-A NATIONAL MENACE. ' In a recent article in “Everybody’s * Magazine” Mr Charles E. Russell deals with slum life in New York and in London.;.., Ho concludes his article thus: — Hitherto the universal, unvarying, absolute experience of mankind lias been that children born and bred in the congested and unsanitary regions of great cities are anaemic, feeble, prone to disease, ill-developed mentally and physically and apt to be unfit morally. These- are the disagreeable facts. We gain naught by trying to dodge them. Well, once more, how about the children -Something like 1,500,000 people let us say, dwell in the unsanitary conditions of New York tenements. What kind of children will they have? What will the next generation be?" If you wish to know you have on.y to' take one look at the East End of London. In New York overcrowding is •new; in London it has been in bill swing for thirty or forty years with such results as are now terrifying tlio whole British nation. ■ ■ . That is what of it. M e might be happy if we could regard the miseries o. those people as their own affair and leave them to work out their own destiny. So, in London, Park Lane once regarded! Stepney, and nothing seemed more comical than that the hovels Stepney inhabited and the mod. it ate or did not eat and the vapors it inhaled should - ever be the anxious concern of tbe well-fed, comolaccnt gentlemen of the West End. But of a sudden Stepney thrust out a scrawny hand and larcl it upon. Park Lane, and all the country gave sober'heed. There , came on a war, and the nation had urgent need of fighters, and there fell upon it the astounding discovery that the horrible conditions that had roboed Stepney of its vitality had a.so robbed Britain of its defenders. These chalkfaced, rickety, meager, nerveless men, born in the foul air' of slums, ill-nou-rished, ill-conditioned, tnese • melancholy scarecrows of the streets, how could they fight? How could they go forth to modern battle? They were not ■even soldiers in Falstaft s sense: they -were not even passable food lor povvUnluckily a nation’s strength, does not lie in its millionaires nor m us fair dwellers in the pleasant places. It lies alone in its common people. , Since .that terrible war the best thought in Great Britain has puzzled •oyer Stepney and what to do with it. To what result you may gather from the fact that down there tne misery daily increases, the problem becomes more awful and more insistent, the inevitable fruits of the system become more apparent. Year by year nip re people besiego the over-crowded work-houses, more gaunt faces line the awful streets, more 'children go hungry, the processions of the unemployed become more frequent and menacing, the terrible pool grows . blacker and deeper. In October, year of grace 1908, it v as announced that 300,000 people in London were practically starving. Very little of this, we think, appeals t<y us;' we that have a country so rich and resources so great. Rich! What lias that to do with it? Great Britain is the richest nation in the world. Rich! Here in London is wealth bewildering, and in the midst of it such an array of starving people as makes one ill' to c-ontemplate. Rich ! That means nothing. Billions of piled gold do not -check our overcrowding nor change the unsanitary dwellings of the poor, wherein are bred the weaklings cf the future. That is what of it. When we see the rapidly growing density of our tene-ment-house populations not only in New York but in every large American city, when we see bow the people pile up m our slums, does there not seem to be a flaw somewhere in this practical wisdom of ours? We pay 12,000,00Gdo!s. for a battleship to defend us against foreign foes, arid nurture within our gates an enemy more menacing than any foreign foe whatsoever; and to suppress the domestic foe we will net expend one cent. For this is, of course, another consideration still more important; and even to those of us that are the best fed and the most comfortable, those of us that live in fine houses and rest &t ease this cheery afternoon, it has, believe me, a graver import than anything else that will occupy our minds for the next year. Where does the tubercu'osis come from? Most of it from these dreary regions. Whence are the scarlet fever and the typhoid, the cere-bro-spinal meningitis and the diphtheria? Bred here. Is the bacillus a •respecter of persons? Not in the least. It may enter our house as easily as any other. Battle-ships and Money Towers and grand insurance buildings _s*nd mountains of juggled assets and colossal fortunes drawn from the policy holders on.one side: vast areas of overcrowded tenement houses on the other. And after us the deluge. So we deal or deal -not with - a problem compared with which the chance of a war with Japan Is no more than a jest.