THE CITY LAUNDRY. Some Further Suggestions.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 260, 24 June 1905, Page 6

THE CITY LAUNDRY. Some Further Suggestions.

TO the person whose view of the eternal hills of Wellington is obscured by the pocket-hand-kerchief on his back-yard clothes* line, the suggestion of Mr. Town Clerk Palmer will come as a refresher. The Town Clerk suggests a day m the near future when the worried housewife will discharge the washerwoman, and the city clerk know the Chinaman no more. When, in fact, the municipal "launderer" will send his vehicle to your door, collect your soiled garments, and retarn them in the evening free from blemish. * * * The action is deemed to* be necessary because of the smallness of the back-yards in this city. In parenthesis we might remark because also of the city Destructor, and the Wellington weather, and the "snowdropper," and lots of things The Wellington municipal laundry, if it comes, won't absorb all the widows and those ladies who support their husbands by charms;, so that the said widows, like the to-be-abolished old-fashioned nurses, will have to take to palmistry, or dressmaking, or politics. • * # But, it seems to us rather curious that dirty clothes should have agitated the Town Clerk in excess of any agitation shown by him about other necessary reforms. For instance, he could have suggested that goods cars should ply on the tram lines, or the much more necessary reform of a municipal milk depot be got under weigh, or that the building bye-laws be enforced, or that the drainage of the suburbs be seen to, and the water supply gone on with. # * * Likewise might he have shouted with extreme vigour about the pathetic wreck in Kent and Cambridge Terraces, and asked why bakeirs, butchers, and others still cart their wares about a prey to the meandering microbe, uncovered and unashamed ? He might have said it wasn't nice of grocers to cart stable manure in their provision carts, and have remarked that every hundredweight of coal sold by the itinerant vendor is not a hundred and twelve pounds He might have dropped an inky tear or two about our shandygaff footpaths — half tar and half mud. » • * Since it is probable the city's washerwomen will be done out of a job, there's no earthly reason why the municipality shouldn't take to window and office cleaning, in order to do away with charwomen. In fact, there is no limit to the usefulness of the City Council, or the size of its staff. As only about a third of Wellington's population has enough room m the kitchen for anything but a frying-pan, the most pressing municipal necessity is municipal cook-houses. Will the Council please see to it ?