ENGLAND’S PAUPER ARMY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2649, 3 November 1909, Page 2

ENGLAND’S PAUPER ARMY.

SOME STARTLING FIGURES

That poverty is plentiful in the Old Country is a fact patent to the most casual observer (writes a London correspondent), but few people even among residents- have any real conception of the amount of poverty existing in our midst. The latest figures issued by the Local Government Board dealing with pauperism disclose a terrible state of affairs. It hardly seems credible that in a country which spends a matter of sixty million pounds a year on armaments and fifty millions on its Civil Service the number of persons in receipt of relief from the-Poor Law authorities should total close upon a million. The actual number on January Ist last was 959,848. This means that one person in every thirty-five living in England and Wales is a pauper, or, to put the figures in another way, out of every thousand of the population twenty-nine depend wholly or in part on the State for the necessaries of life. Of these unfortunates no less than 114,869 were insane. Excluding these the total number of heads of families who were paupers was 74,087 men, 50,245 women, and their dependents numbered 76,829 women and 207,684 children. To this pauper army London contributed, ~.all told, 150,572, wKiclfi means that.4oil& person out of every ''thirty-two in th'e Metropolis is unable to live without State assistance. The proportion out of London is one in thirty-seven, but in some of the chief industrial centres of rthe North of England such as Sunderland, South Shields, Leeds, and Stoke-on-Trent, the pauper percentage is even higher than in London, the increase in casual paupers owing to slackness in trade having been very great during 1908. In Sunderland, indeed, no less than 1000 voters were struck off the list last year because bad times had forced them to accept Poor Law relief. No account is, of course, taken in the Local Government Board figures of men and women in receipt of old age pensions, many of whom, b.ut for the operation of the Pension Act would, at the present time, he in receipt of Poor Law relief in some form.