THE GREAT PROBLFM OF THE NEAR FUTURE.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 7982, 28 September 1887, Page 3

THE GREAT PROBLFM OF THE NEAR FUTURE.

The population of Great Britain, says an article in the Nineteenth Century, is at the present moment being added to at the rate of at least' 100 C persons a day, or in the words of the Registrar-General, "it receives every ten years an accession equal to the whole population of London." . In connection with this enormous growth two points deserve to be noted. The disproportion of the sexes, in itself a serious evil, is slowly but steadily increasing. The distribution of the population is undergoing a sensible change. The towns (except where some special cause is at work) are everywhere growing. The rural population is either standing still or 'actually diminishing. The metropolis alone receives every week an addition of more tban 1000, persons, and the cry is " Still they come 1" In the case of London and or other large cities the " natural increment " is swelled by the crowds who pour into them from every part of the world. Most of these immigrants are unskilled workpeople, or bring what craft they possess to an enormously overstocked market. It does not reouirs the harrowing realism of Mr. George Sims or the picturesque pen of Mr. Walter Besant to prove that where, as in the East End of London, the supply of workers is conBtantly overtaking the supply of work, wages will be driven down to starvation point. When we hear of women working all day and half the night in order to earn 3d or 4d by making * pair of trousers, and 2d by making a pair of full sized sheets and having to find the " extras " for themselves — when we are told that Id is considered a handsome remuneration for filling 144 boxes of lucifer matches — we are tempted to ask: — Is this life ? Is it the kind of existence into which any reasonable being would, if he or she were given any choice in the matter, desire to be born ? Yet there are myriads of our countrymen and countrywomen whose only proßpect , of escape frcm such an existence is the workhouse or the grave. I am not speaking now of that destitution which springs from temporary depression' of trade, or of that which is perhaps inseparable from every state of human society, but of that which is directly due to the fact that 50,000 persons are huddled together in a locality where there is not work or room for half that number.