RAILWAY CO-OPERATIVE CAMP.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 13871, 24 October 1910, Page 8

RAILWAY CO-OPERATIVE CAMP.

A CLERGYMAN'S INDICTMENT.

(SFKCUIi TO "THB PRESS.") AUCKLAND, October 23. The search bgiit of a thoroughlycandid critic was thrown upon the lives of men in the railway co-operative camps by thellev. G. C. Cruickstiank at the mission meeting in connection with the Anglican Synod last night. As a worker in some of tho English slums, 3ie said be thought he had seen some life that was pretty "hefty," as ho phrased it. In the railway camps he knew there were some very fin© men, and he would never characterise a■whole community of men by one term, hut on the whole he had never seen lives so degraded as he had seen in the back-blosks co-operative railway camps in New Zealand. It was too awful for words. The men in these camps could knock out 10s or 15s a day with ease. There was nothing to stop them drinking, for they knew they could be sure ,ot three meals a day, and they dobased themselves in a way that one would never see in the worst slums in England. They lived in tents 10ft by 12ft. It rained 364 J days a year, more or less, and they had absolutely no recreation duriug their long leisure hours but to twiddle their thumbs. One of them had told him that to pass the time they had even read the advertisements on tho iam tin labels backwards. Almost anybody would drink in those circumstances; It was a scandal that those men should bo allowed to live such a life without any provision for their recreation. If ho had had the money to do it. ho would have started a temperance cafe himself and run it under Church auspices among tho camps, and that would have saved many a man.

Mr Cniicksliank siiid that many of the railway workers were the scum of creation, but the greatest difficult}- ho and his fellows had to contend -witih was the sending of remittances from England. Ho implored his hearers, if t~hey ever had a black slieep in .tihe> family, uot to let him become a remittance man. That was the biggest curse that could happen to a man. One of the speaker's friends had known a remittance man who had an order payable to bearer for £1000, and he had had many before that. Mr Cruickshank said that there was great need not only for more clergymen, but for lay workers, to go into the backblocks.