LABOUR AND POVERTY

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 9270, 4 August 1893, Page 6

LABOUR AND POVERTY

PROBLEMS.

Last evening Mr. F. G. Ewington delivered a lecture before the St. Albans Literary Association on " Labour and Poverty Problems." The lecturer traced the struggles of labourers from the time of the peasants' revolt under Wat Tyler, in 1381, down to the great strike at Mr. Carnegie's works in 1892. He showed that labour had not had fair play always in the past, but education, the franchise, humanatarianism, and public opinion, were securing justice for them at last. It was, he thought, the wisdom of the haves" to consider tho " have-nots" as brothers, and not leave even Lazarus to have his sores licked by dogs. He quoted "Caesar's Column," John Rue, and the Bible, to show the ancient Jewish mode of relieving the poor and the stranger, and securing justice between master and servant. Mr. Ewington thought it wrong to blame employers, capitalists, and land-owners for all the poverty and hardships of modern times, because so many tilings upset trade and caused poverty, in addition to internperance and extravagance, and therefore it was absurd to lay all the blame at tho door of the land-owners. He thought that many remedies might bo applied. He did not believe in (macks who had the one only remedy in tho world for all the ills that flesh is heir to—Socialism, land nationalisation, or repression. He thought religion was the first remedy, because men cannot have a true brotherhood until they submit to and acknowledge the true Fatherhood. With true brotherhood, injustice, sweating, and neglect of the poor would cease. Then he thought there should be better laws, State loans at low rates to industrious settlers on security of their farms, object lessons on thrift and sobriety, technical education, co-operation, legislation against rings and corners, taxation of all persons according to their ability to pay, and exemption of all taxes on necessaries of lifo for people earning less than £100 a year, and special taxes on unused capital and unim proved land. He thought that if those measures were given effect to, the labour and poverty problems that agitate the world now would vanish away. The lecturer was accorded a hearty vote of thanks.