“THEY WANT CITY LIFE.”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21955, 17 May 1933, Page 6

“THEY WANT CITY LIFE.”

Since it is hard enough for youths to find employment of any kind in these times, it is the more deplorable when, for no adequate reason, they throw away offers of it. Some days ago we* published a letter from a Dunedin resident in which an appeal was made for assistance in the way of shelter or employment for two youths under twenty years of age. The circumstances of these young men were indicated. They certainly did not appear to be of a nature that would tie them to any locality. The appeal evoked a response which the author of it must have found encouraging. In his kindly intentions, however, he apparently reckoned without one factor. What is of particular interest is that he received offers to give one or other of the youths a home and employment in the country. But, as the author of the appeal indicates in the letter which we publish this morning, these tenders of assistance, couched in terms that might well commend them as most helpfully meeting the cases in question, have after all been made in vain. In what they possibly regard as a spirit of manly independence the youths concerned have declined to go to the country. They want a city life. That presumably means that they prefer to hang about the streets doing nothing, and being a burden on others, to going where the opportunity of leading a healthful and useful existence awaits them. We have had the opportunity of perusing the offers of employment that were made them, and truly, as our correspondent observes, they were of a kind which many adults would be pleased to accept. In each instance a good home and food such as that enjoyed by. the family were offered together with the opportunity of learning farm work. In two cases a readiness to pay wages was signified. In a third the chance of learning sheep-farming and all stock work under experienced guidance, in a deer-shooting and trout-fishing district, might have seemed of a kind that any young man without resources wishing to get on the land would be glad to embrace. But. evidently in the case of too many youths who are drifting about the towns without prospects the offer of plenty of good food at the farmer’s table and other material benefits in return for willingness to assist in country work arouses no enthusiasm. Such an attitude constitutes in itself one of the problems of the hour. It is lamentable to think that youths should reject offers of the kind simply because of their unwillingness to turn their backs on city life. What the attractions of the city may mean to young men who are simply idling their time away at street corners or in equally unprofitable ways cannot be pondered with much patience. The influences to which they are exposed in such circumstances are more likely than not to tend to be demoralising. Clearly the spirit of independence which should manifest itself in a desire to seize the opportunities that offer and relieve others of a burden is too often lacking. This illustration of the disinclination of youths to leave the town for the country points to the existence of an influence that is particularly unfortunate in these times when unemployment is so rife. The folly of the rejection of offers of assistance because they involve migration to the country is in such circumstances as those under discussion only too obvious. It spells, moreover, a poor return to those who would extend a helping hand.