DEATHS FROM STARVATION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5165, 11 October 1877, Page 3

DEATHS FROM STARVATION.

(From the London Daily Telegraph.) It is extremely gratifying to learn that, in the year 1876, no mau, woman, or child died of starvation, so far as the metropolitan coroners were aware, within the precincts of the Middlesex and Surrey portions of the dnchy of Lancaster, her Majesty’s Tower of London, the verge of the Royal palaces, or the Greenwich and New Wadsworth divisions. The returns from the coroners of all the above-mentioned districts are comprised in the pithy word “ Nil.” This immunity from death accelerated by deprival of food did not, unhappily, extend to the central division of Middlesex, in which twenty verdicts of “starvation” were returned; while nineteen cases of the same kind took place in East Middlesex. In the western division there were three cases; in the city of London and borough of Southwark only one; and there was a solitary instance likewise in “ the city and liberty of Westminster.” Nevertheless, the figures, which we have culled from a curious return lately submitted to the House of Commons, are practically delusive. The inquests held on people who die of starvation cannot constitute a tithe of the deaths which are really hastened by the want of nourishing food. Many of the poor creatures comprised in this melancholy list were mere babies, ranging in age from three weeks to three months. For example, one infant, only fifteen days old, died of “ effusion ou the brain, destitution, and privation.” This can scarcely be qualified as a case of “starvation.” The people who were really starved were 60, 70, and even 80 years old. A poor woman of 71, who was in the receipt of three shillings a week outdoor relief, had been offered, and had refused, admission to the workhouse. She died of “ fatal fainting, accelerated by want; but how much of her weekly three shillings possibly went in gin is not hinted at. An old man of 80 with half-a-crown, and another old woman of 67 with three shillings a week and a loaf, also died of “exhaustion from want of food.” In St. Luke’s Union a widow of 71, who had been in receipt of outdoor relief, was deprived of her weekly pittance because she declined to come into the workhouse. Two months afterwards she died of “ exposure and destitution,” a deplorable end ; but surely the parish authorities cannot be blamed for the obstinacy of this old woman in refusing the shelter and the food offered her in the Union. At her age she would not have been compelled to work. She would have regular and sufficing, if not luxurious, food ; but she would not have been permitted to prowl about and drink gin. It is owing to such regulations that so many aged and infirm persons object to the workhouse ; and when they are found dying on doorsteps the pariah authorities are often charged with neglect or inhumanity. Yet there are vast numbers of people who die in London every year of sheer starvation, who have never troubled the parish one way or the other, and on whose remains no coroners’ inquests are held. They starve and die and make no sign.