THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, JUNE 29, 1914. THE CITY AND THE SLUM.

New Zealand Herald, 29 June 1914, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, JUNE 29, 1914. THE CITY AND THE SLUM.

In these days of town-planning and park-making, of palatial buildings, paved streets and massive waterfronts, too little is thought and too little said of the Slum. Yet of what good is it to us if we make a city like the King's Daughter, all beautiful without, if within we leave untouched and unhealed those foul ulcers which shame our Christianity and rot civic life at its core 1 The filth and squalor of the savage, which are a pjjrt of his normal and natural way of living, which fit in with his brutalities and his ignorances, his cannibalisms and his superstitions, Snct which are balanced and made endurable by his simple living and his open surroundings, do not of themselves degrade and demoralise him. He knows no better and can do no excepting as he may be taught by those to whom has come a Light they do not always give him. Of himself he iB but a savage, hardened to savagery and to savage ways.(But our own people are in very different circumstances. They have within them our national concep-. tions, our racial ideals, our Christian sense of decency and conduct. They have' advanced by long and slow and painful journeyings through uncounted generations of social and ethical evolution. They have left far behind them the simple life of plain and forest, hillside and seashore, of constant fighting that keeps the savage strong, and of ever-press-ing hardship that destroys the savage weak. They have grown into an Age of Cities, of mutual interdependence, of individual helplessness, of co-ordinating action, and into that great transition period wherein the practical application of the Christian faith is manifestly the only hope of civilised men. The Slum is the visible sign of savagery and heathenism creeping back upon us, is a pit into which men and women and little children must surely fall as long as we permit it to exist, is a plaguespot, a pest-house, which is all the more evil and deadly in new countries and new cities because we cannot even claim that its destruction is beyond our strength. Every slum in Auckland could be destroyed tomorrow if the civic spirit were strong enough to destroy it. There need never be a dwelling unfit for human habitation in this fair city if public opinion freed itself from its lethargy and decreed that such a thing should no longer be.

The singular thing about the Slum is the pertinacity with which it is defended and the ease with which civic reform ib diverted to other channels. The fact is that whenever we touch it we assail vested interests of the narrowest description, and social conditions with which the averagely decent citizen never comes consciously into contact. Slums exist to-day in Auckland as they have existed for a generation, yet the. voices raised against them are voices crying in the wilderness. There are dwellings in Auckland City which disgrace it a thousand times more than do the steepness of main thoroughfares or the casualness of street planning. They may not be Slums La the London meaning of the phrase, and they may not be as unwholesome as the swarming tenements of Glasgow, Paris, or Berlin. They are Slums nevertheless. There are dwellings and herdeddwellings absolutely unfit for civilised human occupation, erected where dwellings should never have been erected, occupied as no colonial dwellings should be occupied, and lacking in those facilities for decency and comfort without which colonial children cannot be expected to bo-

come decent colonial citizens. That these things exist is not the fault of the civic authority as civic authority. It is the fault of the average citizen, who is too indifferent to support the civic authority in any crusade it might wage against Slums. For the Slum has its apologists, and a civic Peter the Hermit, who would rouse Autiklancl against them, has not yet appeared. v Doubtless this is because Auckland Slums are still few in number and small in extent, but however that may be it is still very much easier to please our citizens with visions of the City Beautiful than to excite them to wage deadly and uncompromising war on the Slum. Yet, visions of the City Beautiful, projects for adorning Auckland with gi%at roads, drives, parks, buildings, and gardenought surely to go hand-in-hand with a spirit of stern determination to root the Slum from our mirW and to it no more..

The difficulty of the situation is well exposed in the easp with which labour organisations and political societies which profess to be sympathetic with the cause of the people pass vague resolutions concerning agrarian conditions they know nothing whatever about, and in the absence of any comment upon Slum evils. The man who lives in Freeman's Bay will tell the back-coun-try settler that the freehold tenure is an unmitigated evil, but he does not seem to have any opinion about the deadly Slum evil that exists in his own district. Even thoso who nominally deprecate the Slum and agree that it is a monUrous evil will often bo found to argue that'if the Slum is destroyed the slum-dwellers will have nowhere to go, and that the poor slum-landlord will be wronged. As a matter of fact the most extortionate rents in proportion to capital value are always drawn from slum-properties, and in the working of economic processes the destruction of tho Slum would very quickly bo forgotten, the percentage of slum-dwellings to the total number of houses being very small. When the demand for earlyclosing, for minimum wages, for statutory hours, for sanitary workrooms is made, we do not find much attention paid to the fate of those whom these regulations may affect, either by loss of business or loss of employment. It is only when tho Slum is touched that there is any effective opposition. Is it not time that the great mass of citizens took the matter in hand, and, while cordially recognising the value of all sound town-planning, determined that first of all the Sum must be destroyed.