DEMOCRATIC KING

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIX, 28 January 1936, Page 7

DEMOCRATIC KING

CURING SOCIAL EVILS

STEADFAST CRUSADER

ABOLITION OF SLUMS

CARE FOR ALL CLASSES

A short time ago the Prince of Wales paid a visit to a huge brick-and-giass block of model flats which bad been newly completed in the midst of a Lon. don slum, wrote Clair Price in the “New York Times” two years ago. Passing an old tenement building which was about to be demolished to make room for more model fiats, he turned aside unexpectedly to enter it. In one of its ground-floor rooms which served as bedroom, kitchen and living room combined, an old woman wiped her bands on a soiled towel and answered the knock at her door. She was struck almost speechless upon discovering, her visitor’s identity. "Come in, darling!” she blurted in her confusion. The Prince laughed, and obeyed. For ten minutes he stood listening to her. Occasionally lie asked her a question. Was her husband working? How? long had he been unemployed? Wluit did they have to live on? But for the most part he stood listening. He lets his informants do the talking. He listens. His interest in what _ she told him was concentrated duel direct. For the moment this housewife of the slums, with her bare forearms wrapped in her stained apron, was the one person in the world who supremely mattered to him. NO LONGER YOUTHFUL He is older than he used to be, and perhaps sadder. The first faint crow's feet of wrinkles have appeared at the corners of his eyes. Every year lie becomes less the Peter Pan and more the responsible citizen. He is still a democrat at heart. The war, the United States and the Dominions have, in fact, made him too much of a democrat to suit some of the Old Guard. The Old Guard have sometimes felt a bit anxious about his disregard of the mystery: and privacy which used to be thought essential to Royalty. They have felt that his hankering after Aracricati and colonial ideas of democracy might incline him.iii later, years toward Ministers of brilliance rather than character, for it is the great emphasis wliich the English place upon character in their public life that makes democracy suspect in the eyes of the Old Guard. . The Prince could hardly be as demo* cratic as he is unless he were a man of strong character and innate dignity. To stand talking with a housewife of the slums and not to lose caste is, after all, an acid test of the power of personality. His sincerity is overwhelming. He is utterly devoid of affectation. ON THE COALFIELDS The explosive energy which used to drive him hell-for-leather at his fences in the hunting.field now in his matuver years sends him on a perpetual round of private and public visits to all sorts of places which interest him—British Legion meetings, East End boys’ clubs, sluin housing projects, centres for unemployed men, etc. lie does this not only in London, blit all over the country', and not only when the slums happen to be a popular issue in politics. .During some of the worst depressions m the coalfields.: he-‘tramped-from cottage. to cottage through the hardest-hit villages, looking at pay-sheets and working conditions, talking with the miners and their families and incidentally drawing country-wide attention to the miners’ sufferings. There was nothing anaemic about these visits. It is usual to regard him' as a figurehead, and in all the ordinary functions of government he is. He cannot. for example, write to the Ministry of Pensions about an ex-serviceman \yl.o has fallen on hard times without being promptly rebuffed Nowadays _ lie has lost much of the spontaneity which used occasionally to betray him into these indiscretions. The line of division between what he can do and cannot do is well definied. But lie is permitted to retain his warm and vivid human personality; he is allowed to indulge all his old eagerness to see everything and know, everything for himself; and perhaps the affection which follows him wherever lie goes is in itself a sufficient power for any one man to wield. PRINCE OF ALL CLASSES More and more lie becomes the Prince, of an industrial country in a grimly industrial age. He gels inside the intimate problems of every class. It is no longer enough that the Throne should he merely above party lines. The King, by accepting the first Labour Government in English history, has sought to lift it above class distinctions as well; and the Prince lias followed m his father’s footsteps by making himself Prince of all classes alike. For the first time the three feathers which the Black Prince worn at Crecy have become the crest of a Prince who has swung away from soldiering, and into the, multifarious social service of a modern country. More and more lie becomes the sober citizen, enjoying .the intimate and informal of his fellow-citi-

zens. . „ , . , If he had to write all Ins speeches himself he would have time fOi nothin cr else, for he has to speak on almost every subject under the sun. But some of the phraseology that goes into a sue cell and all of the emphasis tlun, goes So its delivery are his. And lie does take fire when speaking on a subject on which he feels strongly. AN EXPLOSIVE UTTERANCE He made a speech before the Association of Municipal Corporations at the Guildhall, in which he outlined the pitifully small progress which had been made since the armistice in rooting out the vermin-ridden, rat-infested squalor of the slums. He urged bigger clearance' projects, with larger garden spaces to attract slum dwellers He tackled the problem of rent, which swallows up from a-third to a-lialf of the slum dweller’s wage or dole. , ‘■This nation,” he concluded, cannot afford the perpetuation of the slums. They are 'radiant centres of disease, illhealth and discontent. What is the sense of'treating the slum dweller and especially the slum children for disease, and when they are recovered sending them back to the very centres where disease is rife? To mo that is a process of appalling waste, inefficiency and expense Every generation has a dominating social task. Let our generation be remembered as the one which swept away this blot that disgraces cur national life.” , ~, For a Royal speech it sounds a hit forceful, but cold print conveys an inadequate idea, of its real forcefuliioss. In actual delivery it sounded more like the explosion of a righteous wrath winch had been long pent up. It is difficu t to read it without reminding yourseli that it was poured out by a mail who was born to the purple, who would have liked nothing so much as the command of p. cavalry regiment in India, hut who met the word “duty” very early in lilo —first, in fact, as a.. child of seven,