SINFUL IMPROVIDENCE.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LV, Issue 14135, 15 February 1910, Page 8

SINFUL IMPROVIDENCE.

LANCASHIRE FACTORIES. A writer in the National Review prefers a series of sweeping charges against the operatives in the Lancashire- factories. Whether or not any of the more serious of these is capable of satisfactory explanation is of course not possible to ascertain at the moment. No doubt some answer will bo returned, for the allegations strike right at the foundation of the social fabric upon which the careers of. those communities are rested. It is not lack of money, the writer claims, that is responsible for the starved children, the infant deaths, the stunted physique and mental and moral- degradation of the people, so much as ignorance, indifference, inherited slovenliness and improvidence. Wo learn that good wages are paid by the Lancashire factories and that many families whose incomes amount to five or six pounds weekly live in a perpetual state of debt and improvidence. For Sunday dinner there-may be salmon, lamb and green peas a ntl new potatoes at fourpence per pound; while froin Tuesday to Saturday, the household- exists on a starvation diet of bread and tea _and tinned fish, and pays frequent visits to the pawnshop. While the money is in sight, no luxury is denied. The girls trick themselves out with all manner of cheap finery, and squander their money upon pleasure-seeking. They usually marry at about eighteen, on the strength of a joint income. They know notliing about housekeeping, and care still less. The furniture is bought on the hire- system, and is usually paid for twice over in weekly instalments. Most of the conking is done in a frying -pan, “which produces an indigestible selection o£ potato chips, bacon, fried bread and scraps from the offal shops.” As a rule the girl-wife, continues to work at the factory until the first baby arrives. She buys all; sorts of rubbish from hawkers at the door on the instalment plan, and when the baby is a month old, debts have accumulated to such an extent that she has to go back to work at the factory again. Thus the children are neglected! The rate of infant mortality is ’’'nailing. “It is unite a common thing for a mother to lose three or four children out of six, nine out of twelve,” in early life. It is charged to the system of married women being allowed +n work, that encourages thousands upon thousands of male parasites to loaf upon the earnings of their wives.