EXPENSIVE POVERTY.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 90, 15 April 1908, Page 3

EXPENSIVE POVERTY.

What is the " minimum of efficiency" in regard to a living wage to the labourer? This question was recently answered by Mr George Shann, secretary of the Sweated Industries Exhibition in i;-he. course of an address at University College, Oxford. This minimum, he considered, should include a well-drained house of several rooms, warm clothing, proper food, including conventional luxuries such as tea, a certain amount of recreation, and necessaries for selffeducation. Throughout the United Kingdom generally, he said, the wages of unskilled men were below this standard, a,nd he made some very pregnant remarks concerning the evil results arising from a standard of payment which did not comprehend these requirements. It was time, he said, the country began to reckon how

"much, it paid indirectly owing to sweating. Sweating involved the health of the labourer and his. family. In the case of sweated labour performed at home' children had to take a part in the work, often sitting at their tasks before school, at their dinner hour, and until nine or ten at night. 'they consequently went to school physically unfit to benefit by the instruction offered to them, and public money was largely wasted in the attempt to instruct them. Many of the same children also went to school hungry, and had to be fed at tho expense of the State. The cost of this provision must also be charged against sweating. Prodigious infant mortality and the spread of infectious diseases owing to the dissemination of articles made in infected dwellings were also largely due to sweated labour; and sweated people were .necessarily a tremendous drain upon poor law relief, public j charities, hospitals, missions, etc. All these aspects of the case against the sweater have not previously been put so clearly or pointedly, but they show conclusively that, paradoxical as it may appear, a very high price has to be paid to obtain cheapness. It would surely be better to begin at the beginning, and secure health and happiness to work-people by removing the causes of all evils which i afflict them. This may be done by paying them such a wage as will make their conditions of life brighter and better. Their present pitiable lot would thus be ameliorated, while the heavy burden endured by the general taxpayer, resulting from the grinding poverty of the labouring classes, would be materially lightened. Fortunately for the latter, thinking men and women in the Old Land are beginning to realise this; and some effort is being made to establish improved conditions, but it is only by legislation that the best results can be achieved. And there are signs that much ofc^he advanced legislation on these' lines, which has already done so much in the desired direction in New Zealand, is about to be /tried in Great Britain. Mr Shann, puts the case clearly when he says: "If it was found that a man was competing in the market by having worse conditions for his work-people than his -neighbour, the State had a perfect right to step in and prevent him taping so." y .