ROGUES AND NEEDY

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 189, 8 May 1931, Page 8

ROGUES AND NEEDY

Social Workers’ Problem NEED FOR SIFTING “The difficulty a modern parson has in these times is that often he has to be an amateur detective. For every one genuine needy man that calls at your door there are often twelve who are rogues, I am sorry to say,” said the Rev. W. Bullock, when urging the necessity for scientific investigation in “sifting the rogues from the needy, ’ as he put it, at the annual meeting of the Wellington City Mission last evening. It would have to be ' done in Wellington this winter, he said. The Rev. Bulloek described a case that had come under his notice only at 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon. A man had come to see him, he said, and they had been discussing possibilities of getting work when the man fell in the passage-way in a dead faint. He had called doctors and they had certified, after examination, that the man had not had food for a long time —in fact, that he had had not a speck of food since Sunday. The Rev. Bullock said he had investigated the case very fully, and he assured the audience that there was an answer to any questions that might be raised as to why the man had not sought assistance from the Charitable Aid Board or frc.Yi other sources. A great deal of work in cases such as these would have to be done by the mission, he said. He was not grumbling,- but he wanted to prepare the audience for what was likely to happen this winter. Unfortunately so many of the men who appealed for assistance were no more than rogues and the great difficulty was to tell the needy man from the rogue. He commended this work to the mission, stressing that some method of tabulating should be put into operation. “It’s very pathetic when a man comes to your door with his arm in a sling, and you know he is a rotter, that he has only just put his arm there, and then you bump up against a genuine case, where a man is dying of hunger,” he said. “It is then that you begin to see the necessity for scientific investigation.”