A SOCIAL PHASE OF LONDON.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1143, 9 May 1885, Page 3

A SOCIAL PHASE OF LONDON.

An American correspondent, writing from London in December last, says : — That vast changes are needed none can doubt, when one knows the fact of the present situation. ,"Two facts," says a philanthropic worker among London outcasts, " have been made prominent in the course of the movement — one is the number of apparently honest young men who cannot find anything to do, and the other the great number who are from the provinces. From the country districts the peasantry appear to be streaming into the great towns, there to swell the numbers of the poor. Nobody wants them, nobody cares for them, and they stumble about the hard streets, day after day and night after, with the bitterness of despair in their hearts. No remedy will be thoroughly successful until some means are devised of attracting the peasantry back to the rural districts." The same writer observed thirty-seven people who were sitting all night (through these cold, desolate December nights) on the seats opposite the National Gallery, as well- as multitudes who spent the night in the recesses of the bridges, on the embankment, along by the green park in Piccadilly, in Drury Lane, and twenty-four sleeping on the ground in a single filthy court in Southwark. It is indeed impossible to exaggerate in depicting the condition of this country, especially of London, where the poverty and misery are greatest. If I listened to every appeal made to me in the streets by helpless people, my pockets would soon be emptied. I met the other day, when in the country with a frieud, a woman pale, gaunt, exhausted, indeed half dead, who was walking from Nottingham to London in search of work. Last week there appeared before the Magistrate at Woolwich a man, respectable and sober, who had walked 100 miles in search of work, and who declared he could walk no more. These are a few specimens of thousands and tens of thousands of instances that might be recorded ; and all this while over large parts of the country where the land is steadily going out of cultivation. Hence the urgent necessity for bringing back the people into direct relations with the soil.