THE DOLE GERM

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 November 1929, Page 8

THE DOLE GERM

KILLING AMBITION. Dunces and the dole are the despair of East End employers (writes R. E. Corder, in the “Daily Mail.”) They say that the dole germ has so impregnated the fruits of education that young men who have passed through the council schools have forgotten all . they learned. “What shall we make of our boys?” has always been a parental problem, but the real difficulty to-day is: “Will the boy try to make something of himself?” .

I have seen letters from men aged not more, than 25 .applying for situations in Poplar, and I have been astounded by the illiterate efforts. Bad handwriting, worse spelling, and no idea of composition were shown in these letters by men who are supposed 1 to have the benefit, of an expensive l popular education. ' The majority would disgrace a boy in the first standard.

“How do you account for it?” I asked a builder and contractor. “They have forgotten all they learned because the dole has killed ■ambition and destroyed energy in this 1 district, where the chief demand- is something for nothing,” he replied. “Physically and mentally they (have degenerated solely through idleness 1 hey have become Workshy, stupid and insolent, and' they retain sufficient animal cunning to know how to love softly.”

These boys and girls catch the dole germ as' easily as they catch measles, and from the same cause. They get it from infection. They see their fathers living without working as thousands live in the East Encl where I challenge anybody to discover any open signs of starvation ~iie

pride of poverty keeps the real poor—and there are cases of acute poverty —in the background. They suffer in .silence because they ■would sooner suffer than be shamed. But there are the others, the children of the dole, who know every turn find twist for the law that gives them insurance benefit and parish relief. Cheating the labour exchange is ’ a recognised game involving no loss of social prestige. Cheating the guardians is scarcely necessary in places like Poplar, where unskilled labourers demand a craftsman’s w r age and where continuous work is considered not to be respectable. ;