Slums in the Cities.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8198, 26 May 1906, Page 7

Slums in the Cities.

TiL» ? P ? 6 u tatlve of tho Wellington N™ . ! 6n 5 the rounds of the city with Se with Nurse Boyes, m numn S amongst the poor, the siuspices of that excellent iociutinnM Ambulance Assohe r>n.int l ? rsm S Cuild, and the picture Ho paints is a very hideous one. and aln« i aretf £^ atl B ra^es °f poverty lumdom, f. om the innocently unto , tho wantonly bestial, fall 71? •# H' 0 S{ ? ere of these two nurses, Kntv:.' ,?u t ! lre , of tbe "Submerged it « , W che draws seems repulsive, it must be remembered that these things aie existing m Wellington to day, and j the housing or rather the I cidj promotes their continuance, if, indeed, its excessive rents were, not in the nrst instance a causative factor. It is no fancy picture that is drawn—the sights, sounds and stenches are all things to be soen or heard or smelt, and cerainly not to be forgotten. He describes some of the houses visited. One was in a lane or street, some twenty feet wide, "ght iu the heart of Te Aro, west of j üba-street— a low, one-storey wood and iron barn-line building, end on to the street. Only the end carries tho front door. The front room is a pinched sitting-room, a wan, grey apartment, which eneers at itself, at the sun, and at everybody. The second room is a veritable chamber of horrors—a bedroom in wnieh lies an invalid woman, far gone in aiaease. From the sick room one passes to the scullery, which is a pigstye. The back yard contains a collection of kerosene tins and rubbish and stale everything.. The door of the summer-house stands ajar, revealing the lord and master of this abode—drunk and asleep. He, his invalid wife, their daughter, and two nien lodgers "pig" together in this three-room and scullery abode, for which i the landlord receives 18s a week. ] All the other dwellings in this street 1 are on tho same model. Other houses i whero people are living amongst squalor i and dirt and disease are described—some i better, some worse. Nurse Sexton saya i she has worked in the London slums, t has seen the slums of Sydney and Melbourne, and Wellington is, for its size, worse than any. Evidently in spite of all our " advanced " legislation and Health and other departments, there is still a good deal of work left at the seat of Government for our humanist poli- \ ticians to do. /

Similar investigation in Christchurch shows a different state of things. Nurse Maude says " a good deal of distress is caused through drunkenness, and look at the coals and blankets we give away during the winter. But the Charitable Aid Board will not, as .a rule, give relief to families where the father gets good wages and spends them 011 liquor. You can get a very good idea of the small amount of real poverty there is in Christchurch from the appearance of the school children. If you go along to the Gloucester-street school any morning and watch the children going in, you will be surprised to find how healthy, and happy, and well clothed they are, and it shows that, generally speaking, there is not much wrong with them. There is one thing, however, that I would like to say something about, and that is the state of the houses many of the poorer people | have to live in. Unless a man can pay 10s, 12s, or 14s a week, he simply cannot get a place fit for his family to occupy. Many of the places working people live in are old and insanitary ; the windows were never made to open except a couple of inches trom the bottom, and they ought to be condemned if the Health Department did its duty. The landlords won't do anything but collect the rent, and so things are allowed to go on." "No," said Nurse Maude iu reply to another question. " There is no extreme poverty in Christchurch. There certainly is poverty here and tliere, but nobody needs to go hungry, and charitable aid is readily given to any one really in need of it. There is more suffering from what I should call ' genteel ' poverty in Christchurch than from destitution. The people who suffer most are respec able people, who will not ask for assistance, and who strive to keep up appearance-. We find them out sometimes, and they are invariably people s riving with great anxiety to make both ends meet, and to do so ihey often have to gownhout coals and warm clothing in winter time."