A STARVING NATION.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 95, 24 April 1907, Page 7

A STARVING NATION.

p.lh the course of an address delivered .at Glasgow, Sir Henry Campbell-Ban-, nerman made a strong plea for the betterment of the conditions under which ' hundreds of thousands of people live in Great Britain. Men were beginning recognise, he said, that the concentration of human • beings in dense masses was a state of things contrary 'to.Nature, and that the result was ' hound to be the suffering and gradual degeneration of the mass of the population. "Here and elsewhere to-day," !he .said, "we have the spectacle of countless thousands of our fellow men, and'a still larger number of children, •who are starved of air and space and sunshine, and therefore of the very elements which make a healthy and ] happy life possible. This view of city :life.is so terrible that it cannot be jput away. What is all our wealth, and learning, and the finest flower of our civilisation, and our Constitution, and < *>ur theories~^-what are these Lbut dust and ashes if the men and vwomen on whose labour the'whole soial :f abric is maintained are doomed to live rand die: in darkness and misery in the areas of our great cities? We may uri•clertake expeditions on behalf of op;pr.esse<l tribes and races; we may con*duct foreign missions; we may sympathise with the cause of-an unfortunate inationality; but it is our own people who 1 have the first claim upon' us. Here lit is that this saving principle of the public health comes in; here it is'that the community and men of science join •'hands and insist that the air must be and the sunshine must be al--lowed to enter; water and food must >be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets ; bright and free, and the home anustJbe-made a place m which self-re-specting parents can bring up their 'children as a strength and credit to €be city." The British Premier did 3XOS-go to the length of offering a practical solution of the evils he so freely .admitted. He stated, however, that fhe success of municipal work depend«d on the sympathetic co-operation of tne Legislature and Civil Service, and tnat the municipalities could depend on , receiving every assistance from the House «{f "Commons.