A GREAT PROBLEM.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume L, Issue 8940, 4 December 1905, Page 4

A GREAT PROBLEM.

The cable which we published oa Saturday, stating that an unexpected and embarrassing effect of the raising of the unemployed fund in London has been the attraction to the great city of large numbers of people from the provinces is a very remarkable, instance of the manner in which good intentions are often frustrated by the unforeseen working of perfectly natural laws. In this country we simply cannot understand, cannot grasp, cannot- take in the tremendous fact of the want of employment in London, this winter, or the human misery, the social danger of it. When one reads accounts in the papers these shock and sicken just as have similar descriptions of poverty and distress and human degradation whether from the pen of Socialist workers in the sums of London or from that of the novelist who has pourtrayed the welter of Paris. Biit reality must be far more shocking than the most faithful word pictures, and the state of things in London this winter is evidently beyond colonial imagination. Mr Morley, a leader of the Liberal and Radical party, in blank despondency the other day, said he knew of no remedy, but he also knew that not only party nostrums but schemes of relief, generous as they might be, could only touch tlie fringe, of the problem and might even do as much harm as good. It must have been thought that the very large sums being contributed so generously would at least have afforded means of lessening the trouble, but it appears that the very efforts being made for relief •are creating further cause for embarrassment, for not only is the fund proving a magnet, drawing people to the metropolis, but presumably it is encouraging that depopulation of the rural districts which in, turn must Tesult disastrously on the work of producing food. So that well meant effort in this instance is defeating its own objects, giving proof of the immense difficulty of dealing with social problems and illustrating once again that there is too much truth in the relentless, forbidding argument of the political scientist fcliat the ultimate effects of the most benevolent action, social or political, are more than likely to be something entirely unexpected, and quite likely to do more evil than good. The state of affairs in London this winter is evidently most serious already, and may become worse, in the course of a few weeks. The wonderful thing is that side by eid<* with this terrible distress there is conclusive evidence that trade is good and L that the classes who are in- varying degrees above the "submerged tenth" are in the main doing well and prospering.