Overcrowded London.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 33, 27 August 1887, Page 4

Overcrowded London.

The population of Great Britain is, • at the present moment, being added to at the rate of 1,000 persons a day, or, in other words of the RegistarGeneral, * it receives, every ten years, an accession equal to the whole popu- , lation of London.’ In connection with the 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 dimiuishing. The metropolis alone receives every week an addition of more than a 1000 persons, and the cry is ‘still they come!' In the case of London and other large cities the ‘ natural increment ’ is swelled by the crowds who pour into them from every part of the world. Most of these emigrants are unskilled workpeople, or bring what craft they possess to an enormously overstocked market. It does not require the harrowing realism of Mr George Sime or the picturesque pen of Mr Walter Besant to prove that where, as in the East End of London, the supply of workers is constantly 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 Id by making a pair of trousers, and second by making a pair of full-sized sheets and having to find the ‘ extras ’ for themselves—when we are told that a Id. is considered a handsome remuneration for filling 144 boxes of lucifer matches —we are tempted to ask i Is this life ? Is it the kind of existence 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 prospect of escape from such an existence is the workhouse of 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 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.—Nineteenth Century.-