The Dominion. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1035. THE RELIEF OF DISTRESS IN WELLINGTON

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 217, 11 June 1935, Page 8

The Dominion. TUESDAY, JUNE 11, 1035. THE RELIEF OF DISTRESS IN WELLINGTON

We should be exceedingly. sorry to think that a newspaper heading, read apart from the article below it, had tn any way. embarrassed the .work of dispensing distress-relief m Wellington-. It justice therefore to the recently disbanded Inter-Church Committees and to the Mayor’s Metropolitan Relief Committee, it ntay be we to restate their positions. In a statement published on Saturday morning the executive of the Inter-Church. Committees traced their history. The central committee, it was explained,_ ‘came into existence as an emergency measure to deal with the alleviation of distress befoie any form of Government unemployment relief was in the field to cope with the prevailing need.” Sixteen district committees were set up, and for more than four years these have laboured earnestly (as agents also of the Mayor’s Relief Fund Committee) to attend to the material needs of fellow townsfolk hard pressed by adversity. At no time the executive records, “were the resources of the committees adequate to the demands made upon them. Indeed, the help rendered was often meagre in the extreme, and did but little to take off the sharp edge of acute suffering.” Yet the unemployed themselves, and even more so the wives of the unemployed, will readily agree that the four years of arduous honorary service which the Inter-Church Committees have completed have been rich in helpfulness, in the rekindling of hope, and in great-hearted practical Christianity. _ But the committees were called into being to meet an emergency situation; and, as the executive expresses it, “now.the sharpness ot the emergency has to some extent, passed.” There is qualification here;‘but in the strict use of words it would be correct to say tha. the emergency has, if not passed, at any rate changed to something else. An emergency is a juncture that arises or “crops up : A sudden occurrence —just the sort of situation which the Inter-Church Committees were established to meet four years ago; but one which, in the extent to which it persists, must be regarded now, for the time being at any rate, as a settled state of affairs. A feeling that social conditions which constituted an emergency four years ago are in danger now of being accepted as a normal phenomenon of our economic hie appears to be behind the disbandment of the church committees Thete is a widespread feeling,” says the executive, “that the work should be dealt with on a more scientific and fundamental basis than obtained in the temporary alleviation of distress.” In one sense, theref ore, the disbandment is a protest against what is thought to be official apathy toward a problem that is still of pressing intensity. No protest,_ however, can disregard the -dire straits of families whose breadwinneis, remain unemployed, least of all a protest by the Church; and the Mayor’s Metropolitan Relief Committee, upon which now devolves the main responsibility of sustaining distressed citizens over the bitterest part of the year, should be assured of active private support from the resources hitherto administered by the several Inter-Church Committees. Of the continuing need there can be no doubt. . Fewer people are unemployed, but the condition of those who remain so is general!} worse than it was last year. Their cupboards have been baie longer, their clothing is worn thinner; their homes are even more cheerless; and their resistance, moral and physical, is further reduced. Such is the plight which the Mayor’s Metropolitan Relief Committee sets itself to alleviate; but alleviation will be impossible without wide and consistent public support. There are some 5000 men in Wellington —mostly married and with families —dependent to-day upon rehef work or sustenance, neither of which sources oi income can provide them with more than the barest essentials of life in food and shelter alone, without regard to fuel and clothing. Apart from the possibility of official action, public generosity is the only shield from, cold and hunger of hundreds upon hundreds of women and little children.