SOMETHING ABOUT SLUMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12401, 24 October 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

SOMETHING ABOUT SLUMS.

[by tohttnqa.] As everybody knows, 3 slum is a Habitation unfit foi human beings because distinctly below the recognised standard of sanitation and decency. Every animal having certain elementary rights in civilised society, the slum comes as much within the legitimate range of law as the horse-collar, the sheep truck, and the fowlcoop. It you work a horse with a sore shoulder you cannot work up any sympathy in. a police court by explaining that you have a wife and family at home dependent upon its hauling. If you keep pigs for 48 hours without food and water, the defence that you are a poor widow-woman is not taken seriously. And if you send 'ten fowls to market in an oil-case, the plea that you had nothing better and not a penny to buy timber with may give you spiritual comfort, but will not keep you out of sight of Mount Eden. But if you own a slum you may still do pretty much as you like and set up all sorts of mitigating circumstances, for the law does not yet effectively recognise that the soreshouldered human may be as helpless in the collar as any hoofed beast that ever aroused the indignation of S.P.C.A. enthusiasts. Nevertheless, the law is growing as society grows. If there are any grandchildren coming along—which some think doubtful—they will look back upon the slum days as we look back upon the whipping of madmen and six-year-old labour in the free-trade cotton-mill. The only thing that can keep the slum in existence is the notion that it is only what we have to expect. If the average man and woman are smugly satisfied that it is quite an all-right, thing for somo other man and woman to breathe foul air, dwell in fever-den, exist under filthy Continental conditions in the heart of Anglo-Saxondom, rear litters in kennels, form leprous ulcers of vice and degradation and brutality upon the fair body of a virile State, the slum will last and swell until city life is poisoned by it. If, on the other hand, the average man and woman get to think as much of suffering humanity as they do of galled horses and thirsty*sheep, the slum will go. For effective law invariably reflects the feeling of society, sometimes distortedly _ but always in a practical fashion. There isn't any "doubt about this any more than there is that mere statute law isn't worth the paper it is printed on unless it is made common law by the popular will. This is where publicity comes in, as a moral force. To make public evils towards which society inclines is to educate the ignorant in the ways of sin, but, to make public evils against which society is setting itself is to pave the way for their eradication. To describe a bull-fight to a Spaniard is to make him want to have one in the nearest plaza. To describe a live : pigeon-shoot to an Englishman is to make him want to turn his sporting fancies to nobler use. If the describing of slums only interest us there is no hope of wiping them out. If knowledge of them stir us to righteous wrath their' end is soon. For the slum-dwellers themselves are as helpless as the pigeons. They may even like their form of existence. The cardinal problem of civilised society is always what to do with the unfit. Savagedom has no such problem, foi it ruthlessly destroys tho physically inferior unless their great mental superiority enables them to survive and to rule. Barbarism lias the dawning of tile problem, but solves it by the charity which maintains in an outcast condition those who cannot take their place in the ranks. Civilisation has to face not only the problem of the occasional unlit but that terrific problem of an unfit class which assumes permanent shape the moment civilised conditions enable the physically and mentally inferior not only to survive but to propagate. This' problem is made infinitely more perplexing and more pitiful by the accompanying loosening, in unfinished civilisations, such as ours, of the hold of the average man upon place in the social structure. So that by mere accident, by industrial changes, by one or other of the many shocks to the individual inevitable where society at large is in the unceasing industrial, commercial, political, and social agitation of a great, transition period, men of average' capacity and recognised merit, are precipitated to the level of the unfit class, dragging their families with them. The slum yawns to receive them, and the atmosphere of the slum is demoralising to manliness and womanliness of the civilised type, for the permanent element of the slum, that which gives it its moral tone, is the physically, mentally, intellectually, and morally unfit.

So that when we consider the shim we must- perforce regard it not only as the abode of those to whom its abominations are more, congenial than the healthier and nobler surroundings which require continual effort to maintain them, but as a hideous trap that lies' in wait for those who may stumble through accident or bo pushed down by the seemingly erratic movements of industrial society. That we should allow such trans to" exist in the pathway of human life is wrong. From the purely pagan point of view it is intolerable. From the practical Christianity point of view it j is ungodly and infamous. So complete and convincing are the altruistic reasons against permitting the slum ta exist that we need not selfishly remember that it may bo the doom of any of our children to perish thus, or that they are hotbeds of every vice and every disease which threaten civilised humanity. This latter fact, however, justifies us in refusing to permit them to exist even if they were inhabited only by those who deliberately choss such dwelling, and in declaring that undsr no excuse or pretence shall any man or woman or child be allowed to remain in unsanitary, indecent, or degrading surroundings. At any rate, if we cannot prevent degrading conditions, we should see that no manifest degradation exists outside of prison or reformatory —and we shall do so, some day. For it* is an incontestable principle of our civilisation, a principle for which we have to than)- that Christian indoctrination which lias slowly saturated the thoughts of sectarian and secularis* alike, that a sufficient standard of human comfort and decency is to be accorded to every living soul in the State. And it is an equally incontestable principle of our civilisation, a principle for which we have to thank the.iough-snd-ready instincts of the Goth within us, that, this sufficient standard of human comfort and decency shall not merely be offered to all, but shall be

[ forced upon the unwilling. No man shall ; hav a hor.se unless he treats it somewhat ! humanely; and no man shall have a house j unless it is lit fur people to live in. You i must cover your nakedness whether you j would or not. You must not expectorate on the pavement. You must keep yoiu tongue under control. You cannot buy a human chattel, be it ever so willing. In fact you cannot do just as you like will what yon are pleased to call your " own,' ! but only that which the dominant public opinion, shaped into law, considers yon may do. Ibis is sad, in a vrij. There were mam virtues commonly possessed when tin slavers of Bristol went down tc the Spanish Main, and John Bright was a sterl ing Englishman even when he spoke golden-tongued, against State interference with years and hours of labour. And i may be that we do look too much to lav and too little to our own right hands, anc that we are apt to cry out to Pavliamen long before we arc really hurt. But t< say this, is only to say that we are unit and imperfect men. groping our way in th gloom towards a kindlier light. And a least, coming back to the shims, there i little chance of making serious mistrt-k when we insist that unwholesome dens an feet id homes, in which the dignity of me and the modesty of women are beaten dow by the bitter sense of brutish surroundings shall not be allowed. For to trample wit indifferent feet upon the broken lives an bruised hearts of our own kith and ki is » million million times worse than t work a horse with a sore shoulder.