The Manawatu Daily Times How the Poor Live

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 7064, 25 January 1933, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times How the Poor Live

How often lias it been proved in the social history of our time that more knowledge is the first indispensable step to improvement ! Forty years ago there was no lack of good will toward the poor and desire to improve their lot ; but sentiment was defeated by sheer ignorance of the conditions under which the poor lived. A pioneer step in the ivaifuic against poverty in modern cities was taken when Charles Booth organised his house-to-house and street-by-street investigation in London, and published his survey of the “Life and Labour of the People.” What a picture it revealed of poverty and deprivation in the poorer quarters the Last End of London ! Nearly one-third of the population of this huge area was living below the “poverty line,” amid misery caused in the main not by unemployment but by brutal sweating.

The forty years which have intervened have seen a change in that. A similar inquiry in the same area has been made in recent years under the direction of Sir H. Llewellyn Smith, and some of the most important results have-just been published in the third and fourth volumes of the New Suivey of London Life and Labour.” Most of the materials were accumulated in the year 1929 —that is to say, before the present world slump in trade had produced its dire results in doubling and in some districts trebling or quadrupling the already large numbers of persons unemployed in England.

The efforts of those forty years were not in vain. Of the population of this poor region—nearly 2,500,000—n0 less than three-quarters of a million would be living under the poverty line” if the conditions were still the same as in Booth s time. Actually, in 1929 the number was about one-quarter ot a million. Those “under the poverty line” are persons subject to conditions of privation which, if long continued would deny them all but the barest necessities. It is indeed rightly recorded as a “grim” fact that there should still have been onetentli of the population living under these conditions. But the reduction of the number is striking evidence of improvement.

It is also a fact worth noting that the amount of deprivation duo to “sweating”—which accounted for most of the poverty a generation ago—was in 1929 almost negligible ; wherever it occurs to-day it is generally due, not to offending employers, but to lack of employment. Even this hardship is modified, as it was not then, by old-age and other pensions, and by unemployment insurance. The poverty winch the new surveyors discover in East London is due to inability to find iobs • and it is established by this inquiry that most of the unemployed “genuinely wish to obtain work.” «tocir active search for jobs, it is recorded, fills a larger space in their lives than is commonly believe^-

One ugly feature of the survey is the continuance of overcrowding owing to insufficiency of housing accommodation. The census figures reveal a small improvement between Ll_l and 1931, but not nearly enough. There still exist plague spots of intense overcrowding” which ought to be swept away. The problem is far from an easy one in a vast city like London, and it is complicated by the fact that many poor persons are unwilling to be removed even from very bad dwellings to houses distant from their work.

The main conclusions to be drawn from the surveyis that, while there has been improvement in conditions of living, and in morale which might have seemed incredible forty years ago, there remains a tremendous uphill task to be accomplished, twofold in its nature—first, in providing work for willing but workless men and women ; and, secondly, in providing enough and better houses for them to live in. They _ are problems which, in various forms, repeat themselves in cities in many parts of the