A CURE FOR POVERTY.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 43214, 13 August 1907, Page 4

A CURE FOR POVERTY.

If Mr G. B. .Shaw is preaching Socialism merely for tlie sake of notoriety, as many of his critics say he is, he is doing it uncommonly well, and with very considerable success. Last month he was “billed” with Mir Will Crooks, MP., and Mr Hi. G. Well® to speak at Queen’s Hall in London on the “Sweating Question, v and a fashionable audience,of men and women — principally women—crowded the place to listen to his address. Lords and ladies i and v fashionable clergymen thronged the reserved seats, and wellknown actresses and professional beauties displayed themselves on every side. Mr (Shawl spoke to these people with his accustomed candour. “I don’t want to improve your 1 minds,” he said. “I don’t care enough about them. I want to get something done.” And then he went on to expound what he called, in his whimsical way, a new truth. “I must tell .you, then,” he continued, “a truth which it has been reserved for me to discover, namely, that what the noor suffer from is poverty: I have heard all sorts of other explanations from well-to-do people, who judge by the manners of the nluin'ber who ocanes to mend the drains, or their gardener, or the tramps )who call at the door. They say it is intemperance, improvidence, anything but the truth—but it is just poverty all the time.” Having revealed another ‘simple truth,’ that the one way to relieve poverty of the ,poor was to give them money, Mr Shaw proceeded to decry the., ordinary methods of charity—subscriptions to hospitals and so forth—which, in his opinion, only took responsibility off the employer. “There is,” he observed, ‘five hundred millions of money wasted on these and other things every ■"• ear —all available for the abolition of poverty.” “Why,” he exclaimed, “look at the millionaires, stalking round Europe, endowing libraries showing otherwise that they simply don’t know how to get rid of their money.” But Mr Shaw did not reserve all his reproaches for the wealthy classes represented by his fashionable audience. He upbraided the poor themselves. “Thev like being poor,” he said. “There is 'something virtuous in being miserable. Here, for instance,; are you rich folks paying tlo hear mei speak on the Wage I I have stood at the street! comer and harangued them unasked l —but I find it difficult to get them tlo listen to me at all.” Probably Mr Shaw is not just the sort of orator that attracts the very poor. He points to the remedy for their poverty, ibtoti he leaves it still beyond their reach. A very earnest reformer is required to put the dreamer’s theories into practice.