SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN LONDON.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 4646, 26 April 1902, Page 3

SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN LONDON.

Lord Hardwicke. Under-Secretary for India, speaking at the opening ot a u’orkrng Men's Club in Bethnal Green road and dealing with the question of pauper alien immigration, said that so laj;ge was the foreign element in some parts of East Loudon that it was difficult to believe that they were in an English town at all. .No Englishman had the least objection to foreigners having a fair field. They had enjoyed this privilege in this country from time immemorial, and had always been welcomed so long as they were equipped to assist in the progress, the development and prosperity of the laud in which they had settled. But, from the economic point of. view, it was not fair competition for ah alien to dump himself down in this country without any visible means of subsistence, taking any work for any wage, regardless of its effect on the labour market, paying any rent for any bole into which he could creep, regardless of sanitation, and 1 adopting a stanclan. of living which was repulsive to all those who had .any .sense of decency. Tile most serious aspect of this condition of things ivas that it played into the hands of tne bad landlord and the sweater. The housing question, jvhioh was without doubt one of the most serious social problems they had to face in London, seemed to him to get more acute every day. It was a matter which went to the root of the very existence of the community, and he simply marvelled at the action of certain English politicians in regard to the concentration camps in South Africa —a transitory evil caused by the peculiar exigencies of a state of war—when in East Loudon, under their very noses, they had, as a permanent factor in the daily life of the people and in a time of profound peace, the same problem working itself out with equally fatal if less obvious results. The London County Council had done something towards dealing with the housing question, but they had never attempted to grapple with the problem as a whole. They had tinkered with it here and there, and he thought it was more than probable, though he did not state it as a fact, that, on a balance, they had displaced more people than they had re-hocsed. Ho might be asked what the present Government was going to do to remedy the state of things to which he had called attention. He could only reply that he was a subordinate member of the Government and bad no right to speak as to the specific intentions of the Government in regard to the housing of the working classes. But ho could assure them that the Government was as fully alive to the terrible evils resulting from the present condition of affairs as .were those in that room, and he was sure it would he the desire of the Government to deal with these problems in a way which though it .might not provide a remedy of immediate effect, would at least show that they were not insoluble.