The Evening Star THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 1932. CAMPS FOR SINGLE MEN.

Evening Star, Issue 21006, 21 January 1932, Page 8

The Evening Star THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 1932. CAMPS FOR SINGLE MEN.

We can sympathise with every trouble of the unemployed except their denunciations of the camps for single men. The complaints against those, if we were less used to them, would amaze us. Their reiteration leaves us cold. There must he a great many people whom it makes resentful. We have always admitted that the camps are not for all single men. The pay is too small for the man who has dependents. The work is too hard for men who are not able-bodied. But the camps were never established to provide for all single men. That at Deep Stream has accommodation for about eighty, and that at Lindis Pass for about thirty. There are just under 1,000 unmarried men unemployed and eligible for relief work in Dunedin. That must leave a sufficient number, without any of the sound reasons for avoiding them which we have instanced and which correspondents, in answer to “Miriam” and other upholders of the system, have pleaded, to keep the camps filled several times ovef. That they are not filled in those circumstances certainly is most surprising and discouraging, A few days ago there were twenty vacancies at one camp and fourteen at the other, and the shortages have been only slightly reduced since. During the last month or two, it was reported last week-end, eighty-nine single men who were specifically offered work at either of the camps refused to take it. Since the number who accepted it was not sufficient to prevent substantial vacancies, that makes certainly a paradox of hard times. What is the matter with the camps for the right class of unemployed? Beyond complaints of the low pay (which there has been some promise of improving) and the hardness of the work, no one has said specifically. Abuse in regard to them has taken the place of arguments. It was a fine cry, for electioneering purposes, to call them “Kaffir compounds,” and some people were apparently deceived by that and similar imaginative flights. But the election is now over, and when we find a correspondent, obviously in all good faith, saying that in her youth she lived in tents on and off for years with her family, but “not under the conditions our lads arc asked, to face to-day”— so much worse (by inference) than the life of the pioneers—we can only rub our eyes at such evidence of human credulity. When she asks could a mother “sleep in a comfortable bed knowing her sons” [aged twenty or upwards] “were in such a place as the camps arc?” “Truthful James’s ” question;

Do I wake? Do I dream? Are there visions about ? Is our civilisation a failure? Or is tho Caucasian played out?

makes tho only answer. Fortunately, there are reassuring facts, though they only mako this condemnation of the camps more amazing. Our youth sleep in tents, and they tramp’ over the Southern Alps, through the wildest places of Western Otago, working harder, for longer hours, than anyone has to work at Deep Stream, and they call it pleasure. Let us think of the “Kaffir compounds.” Wo shall speak of the Deep Stream camp because we know it better than the other. The men work hard, but they arc not out of touch with the world. They have the newspapers, a'”wireless, tho gramophone, and equipment for games. Concert parties have gone out to them, and we hope will continue to do so; though they will be an unusual collection of New Zealanders if, by this time, they cannot provide very inspiriting concerts of their own. They are fed well and well sheltered—while it is summer. Clothes wear out fast, but that can be provided for. When it is complained of thin soup it should be remembered that soldiers did not get soup except as a luxury. They life a life in surroundings calculated to make them “ fit as fiddles.” If they are without dependents, and can treat the depression (save only as it makes an unprofitable interval in their lives) as the tale-tellers in the ‘ Decameron ’ treated the pestilence—something remote from their sheltered existence —they need have not a care in the world. We shall not grieve for them in hard times.

There can be complications. A young man may have no present dependents, but ho may want to get married. Deep Stream will not help him to do that. Neither will a life hanging about the city, which some unmarried men seem to prefer. “We cannot all be navvies,” complains a single man with a trade—useless to him in the conditions that obtain. But no power can cater for all men as if the depression did not exist. If we were an employer and wanted a ** navvy,” when these clouds have lifted, as they will do, the man who had stuck his term at Deep Stream and taken the best from it is the first man we should engage. Most of the men there, and especially the older ones, are contented. It is the youngest who kick most against the pricks. Is “ a period of almost luxurious living,” in which they have been brought up, the explanation? Or do they find realities so hard to grasp that when a depression visits us, as the war visited us earlier without our consent, they can only rail at it and find injuries everywhere? An incredible correspondent has just found his' injury in the number of people who are called “ Your Grace ” (in New Zealand) and the wickedness of an “hereditary aristocracy”! Like “ Miriam,” we have no patience with these attacks on the camps for single men. Those unmarried men who are by circumstances disqualified for their benefit should have nothing to do with them; married men have most reason to approve of them, as lessening the competition for town jobs which ought to go first to married men when there are too few for all; and the outcry in general should bo ended now. It is not honest when it is made without knowledge; it is not edifying when it is based on experience; and the persistence of it may do grave disservice to those unemployed who have real need of sympathy and of help.