POOR RELIEF IN BRITAIN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 509, 20 November 1909, Page 4

POOR RELIEF IN BRITAIN.

It is hardly creditable ttyat in the Old Country which spends a matter of sixty million pounds a year on armaments and fifty millions per annum on its Civil Service, the number of persons in receipt of relief from the Poor Law authorities should total close upon a million. The actual number on January i, 1909, was 959,848. This means that one person iu every thirty five living in England and Wales is a pauper, or to put the figures in another way, out of every thousand of the population twenty-nine depend wholly or in part on the rates for the necessaries of life. Of these unfortunates no fewer than 114,869 were insane. Excluding these the total number of heads of families who were paupers was 74,087 men and 50,245 women, and their dependents numbered 76,892 women and 207,684 children. To this pauper army Loudon contributed, all told, 150,572, which means that one person out of every thirtytwo in the Metropolis is unable to live without assistance from the rates. The proportion out of London is one in thirty-seven, but in some of the chief industrial centres of the north of England, such as Sunderland, South Shields, Leeds and Stoke-on-Trent, the pauper percentage is even higher than in Loudon, the increase in casual paupers owing to slackness in trade having been very great during 1908, In Sunderland, indeed, no fewer than 1000 voters were struck off the lists last year because bad times had forced them to accept Poor Law relief. No account, of course, is taken in the Local Government Board figures of men and women in receipt of old age pensions, many o( whom, but lor the operation of the Pension Act, would at the present time be iu receipt of Poor Law relief in some form.