Auckland Slums.

Levin Daily Chronicle, 19 November 1918, Page 3

Auckland Slums.

i WOMEN HAVK SEEN THINGS THTTY "WILL XKVER FORGETT. (By Elsie K. Morton in the Auckland Herald). We who love our beautiful Auckland see her to-day in garb of sorrow, under ■n cloud of affliction darker than any that has ever before shadowed her joy and fair name. The distress caused by the widespread ravages of influenza has been in itself overwhelming. But even greater and more tragic is the terrible revelation that has come of an unsuspected, and horrible canlcer gnawing at the very heart of Auckland, of which little has been said publicly, in mercy to a stricken city.

We, as a community, have learned for the first time that Auckland is a city possessing many shims. It is not a pleasant discovery. It 'has oome with nothing less than the force of a stunning shock to good folk who honestly and sincerely believed, in spite of frequent rumouTb to the coirtr«ry, that tie Auckland working man and his children were decently, if poorly, housed and. fed

and clothed, and that all the protest* made on his behalf were but the clamouring of an idle diisoontent. The experiences of the past fortnight have shattered ail these comfortable theories. When first the urgency of the position was realised a number of valiant men and women offered their services in stricken homes. They began to investigate. What they found they will never be able to forget. They have found a destitution so terrible as to wring the heart; they have founu pestilential filth, and an ignorance enu utter disregard of the most elementary principles of cleanliness and sanitation. This is how they found it. Thej entered a hovel not more than a i-tone s throw from the Town Hall, and found there ten sick and dying men and women. Two of them were laid, out on the dirty floor"of a wash house; others lay covered with rags, in stifling "rooms" just big enough to hold a stretcher. The rest were upstairs in a dark attic. The wall paper hung in- hideous strips from sta.inedj and dirty wallk; the windows, tightly shut, were grimed and cracked, the holes in them stuffed up with rags. Outside, in a tiny, corrugated iron shed, without light other than that w'liich came through its cracks a sick man lay on the damp <rround, covered with two odd sacks. No one liad brought him food or medicine, and he was dying. In another squalid hovel six little children were found in one bed, unclothed, crying for food; there wa? not a morsel to eat in the house; the mother lay dying in another wretched bed beside them. In yet another, a family of ten people, all siok, were found dead, «.nd d(yinjr in cellars and gairrets under conditions too terrible to Tie described, in places that could not be entered until measures of disinfection were taken. These instances oould be multiplied and still further horror added by any of the people who have been working in the city through the two "weeks. They have found numberless "homera" where the only water laid on is from a standpipe over a malodorous drain, where privacy and decency are absolutely impossible, "'homes" 'whose dirt and squalor make them breeding-gro-unds of immorality andi disease. Of stark dai-titution, little starving, pitiful children, of thriftless parents, of conditions of sordid unoleanliness they can tell many a story. Some of them could not possibly be told in print.