DESTITUTION AND ITS PREVENTION. .

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1505, 30 July 1912, Page 9

DESTITUTION AND ITS PREVENTION. .

■ * Destitution and its prevention—a field wide enough to includt most phases of tho social question—is tho subject of a four-day's national conference opened at C'axton Hall, .Westminster, on Juno 11. Several , hundred public authorities and voluntary associations wero represented. Dr. Gore, Bishop of Oxford, rapidly surveyed the whole field of roffan in his inaugural address as president, proclaiming first his faith that "destitution of tho kind which degrades whole classes and masses of society is preventable and relievablc. It is man's work, not God's. Never did any public misery arise of itself." His comments upon tho subjects down for debate often fell into the form of crisp aphorisms: "There is nothing so expensive, nothing so utterly and simply national waste, as to allow our boys and girls to grow up into ill-nourished and diseased citizens." "A great deal of our education is not of the kind which best serves to equip a man for life, whether in town or country." "We need to take to heart- to what, an extraordinary extent we are falling shor! of obtaining what the land, might do in the way of bearing a vigorous, happy, and hopeful population. Much housing in tlio country directly promotes destitution and incapacity." "The responsibility for orime is a social responsibility; it belongs to us nil." "I am sure the association with religion of charity—of cadging—has disgusted with religion that which is best and most honeful in the great aniiy of progress. AVe have been going about with the. ambulance cart when we ought to have been thundering at tho gates of tyranny, at the gates of those great dungeons" and strongholds which keep men captive." Dr. Gore also spoke with warm approval of the National Insurance Act, nnd foretold that it would lose a great measure of its present unpopularity when people understood it better.