THE SLUM CHILDREN OF LONDON

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 288, 29 August 1908, Page 11

THE SLUM CHILDREN OF LONDON

Few peoplo in Now Zealand, unless they havo actually been to London and paid a visit to slumland, can realise the fact of children growing up and never in their lives having played in green fields, climbed trees, pulled the wild flowers that grow so plentifully, or heard tho birds sing. Various charities have been formed for tho purpose of taking them . into the country in the summer, and through these efforts probably between sixty and seventy thousand have been sent there for a holiday of two or three • weeks. In the vast majority of tho cases tho parents pay part of tho cost. Sometimes excursions have been farmed for giving one-day trips, usually to Epping Forest, but still there arc hundreds who havo not vet been reached. Of late, says an English paper, a mysterious philanthropist has been appearing in East End streets giving children penny tickets for dinner at tho Alexandra Trust., They wcro assembled; an army of them, each with token in hand, waiting to march ' forward and to invade the rooms, that bear tho name of tho Queen whom the poor love. What an amazing spectacle they presented! Here were girls carrying babies—babies of a kind that I pray I may never see again, tiny beyond conception, flabbyrfieshed, and most of them soon to die. It is not for nothing that Hoxton has the highest child mortality in London. Hero were bovs of six, scarce half the size of laddies I know in the country who are not yet three. Hero were rags everywhere, and bare feet in plenty. But rags and bare feet cause no real suffering to children in summer-time. Much worso were the signs of genuine want and of undoubted neglect. Was it possible that these children lived within a milo of the Mansion House, tho centre of tho richest city in the world? Nono of tho children were playing romping gamos. Tho fetid smells of the side streets do not oncourago boisterous spirits. Yet in ono corner you might havo seen a party intent on a small dramatic performance, repeating the side-splitting and ever-attractivo faros "Mnvver's Drunk." And the little girl who lurched along with inimitablo grace, givin.g her mother's Saturday evening mannerisims, well deserved the feeble applauso Of her audience. If I tell of Hoxton, it is not becauso Hoxton stands alono. I might have gone' into the side streets of Spitalfields, the back lanes of tho borough, the purlieus of Lambeth, or tho slums of Notting Hill. In all of these •places I should have found tho same, as you can see it this very afternoon. We have in London scores of thousands of little ones whoso only playground is tho alley-way, with 110 park or open space near them. It is impossible to allow a young child to go off for n two-milo tramp through the London streets from Hoxton to Victoria Park, and the father and mother liavo no time to take them.

"These. children in tho streets are l)y no moans our saddest cases." one Hoxton worker told mo. "Tho many delicato boys and girls shut up at homo who cannot get out aro far worse. They aro confined in one room, and you can . imagine what one-room tenements aro like m weather like this Wo want to get them away to tho country for two or three weeks. But how can wo? For every child we can take wo can find a scoro who ought to go. When we send tho'ono out wo know that the nineteen aro left."