THE COLONIST.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 360, 5 April 1861, Page 2

THE COLONIST.

NELSON, FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 1861.

' Notwithstanding all our wars and the frightful expenditure under which, like honest Britcns, we are groaning and swearing, the revenue tables, made up to the close of ISGO, indicate a state of absolutely alarming prosperity. We say alarming, because it almost looks as if the more taxes we paid, and the higher our expenditure, the more we are able to pay. and the higher our income. There is a large increase, both on the quarter and the year—the foimer upwards of one million, and the latter nearly two.'— Home News.

The above sprightly account of the happy prosperity of England must be looked upon as a very one-sided view of the matter ; in fact our readers as well as ourselves have a different method of judging of the success of a countiy and the happiness of a population than what is afforded by the Stock Exchange or the money markets generally. It appears to us to be a mockery of the great national woe. We give the two following documents as a fair specimen of a metropolitan life in England and of a country life in England's far-off' dependency—the East Indies. The same paper from which the article on the distress in Stepney is taken contains one day's proceedings at - the various police courts in London, as well as a list of contributions by private individuals who have come forward to somewhat ameliorate the wretched condition of their miserable fellowcitizens and Christians. The Mansion House, Guildhall, Clerkenwell, Marlbo-rough-street, Lambeth, South war k, Westminster, and Thames Police Offices changed their vocation from the trial and punishment of offenders against the law, to become the dispensers of the liberal but wholly inadequate donations from private sources. The pittance of bread doled out at these various offices was eagerly clutched by the surrounding starving thousands. The' scenes at the Thames police-court baffle all description : hundreds and hundreds of poor, shivering, starving wretches, who had been waiting about the court from ten in the. morning till the. same hour at night, had to return to their cellar or garret homes without participating even in this moreel of dry bread. The press has taken up the subject of the inefficiency of the present Poor Law to meet the exigencies of these and similar cases, which are sure to occur where millions of human beings ate congregated together, and 'living from hand to mouth.' Yet they manage these things better in Japan and China. We trust 'yet to see the day when this gigantic Whig work of centralisation will be destroyed, and a

more economical, efficient, and humane system introduced. It has been well observed of the present Poor Law :—• It is perhaps well adapted for that permanent form of want which is always with us, for it provides permanent maintenance at the public expense for that portion of the poor who are 1 educed by accident* widowhood, and orphanage. It also provides for a handsome staff of officials, ivho draw their salaries, and then laugh at the surging tide of casual distress. .. . . The deficiency of the Poor Law now peeps out. It is composed of red-tape, foolscap, and officialism.' The accounts from the country districts are harrowing indeed ! and' Ireland has yet to come. The manufacturers are in. trouble concerning the unfortunate disruption of the United States; and should the usual supply of cotton be in anyway interfered with, then will the north of England* pour fourth her myriads of starved operatives, who have been reduced to such a specialty, by the extreme subdivision of labor in England, that when taken from the factory they are utterly helpless. And yet England must go to China, to Japan, and to the uttermost parts of the earth, in order to confer jon its well-governed peoples the blessings of Western civilisation, Western institutions, and Western constitutions. DISTRESS IN STEPNEY. To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle. Sir—l beg to communicate the following particulars respecting the neighborhood of Stepney, in which so much distress prevails, as referred to in the article, ' a scene at the Thames police-court,' published in the Morning Chronicle on the ]6th instant. The parish of St. Dunstan, Stepney, at the last census was computed to contain not less than 60,000 inhabitants. This number does not include any portion of the hamlets of Ratcliffe, Poplar, Limehouse, or Whitechapel. It is that neighborhood which immediately surrounds the old church of St. Dunstan, situated in High-street, Stepney, midway between the Commercial-road and Mileend.

Theinhabitants generally consist of tradespeople, a few dock clerks, and many thousands of dock laborers, whose very existence may be said to depend upon their employment in the docks. Let the docks be closed for one week, and the amount of privation, misery, and wretchedness which must result can be more easily imagined than described. The streets in which the poor reside are long, and often narrow. Here is one:—lt contains 83 houses. In these are 120 families residing. These mainly depend upon the docks for bread. They are the ' decent poor. Take an instance. A family reside in one room of one of the houses (I should say, by the way, that the houses in this street mostly contain two rooms and a small slip of the passage called a room, while others have three rooms and the said slip). This family consist of husband, wife, and five children. The husband is a coal whipper. He is ill, and unable to work if work could be had. His wife— a thin, spare, careworn woman, with an infant at the breast—is only too glad to walk up to the washhouses in Whitechapel arid stand there as long as nature will allow her to earn the few pence on which they manage to exist. She comes home to enter that room of half-starved children to give them half a meal. She does not complain. She stoops not to ask for charity, and she would famish if benevolence did not seek such cases as hers on which to expend its blessed gifts. - ■

Another instance—a young couple live, with one little child, in a room scarce large enough to form the plate chest of many a mansion in our land. The husband is sober, industrious. He is a dock laborer. Follow him to the docks. He stands amidst a group of others like himself, hoping against hope. His wife, clean, smart ever when the husband is in work, has pawned everything worth pawning she possesses. She has sold the chairs; she cannot sell the bed, at least not yet and she, too, remains in that desolate room, without fire, food or clothing—murmuring, yet not asking charity. Another instance in the same street—Here is a room in which is a bedstead, having nothing on it but a few old garments with which its occupants contrive to cover themselves at night-time, two broken chairs and an old table. There is no fire in the stove In one coiner of the room, huddled up under all the rags he fancies to be his clothes, sits a poor, pale, half-famished boy. His looks tell the tale of want, for he speaks no word of complaint. His sister has just come home. She wears a faded black dress—mourning for her mother — and there is an attempt at finery on her head, which makes her misery and wretchedness all the more palpable. The boy looks up into her face. She shakes her head. She has been to try to obtain a soup ticket, and is unsuccessful. They must wait. Hunger must be their companion yet a little longer. The boy tries to think of his mother—so at least the girl says. And she thinks ot her suffering; father lying in the hospital. And there they are this bitter weather, without friend or helper, shivering, famishing, and yet struggling to maintain virtue intact. God help them! Yet another case. In a decent room—clean, neat—sits a man paralysed from head to foot. He shivers as well he may, for there is no fire in the grate, and he has not tastsd food all day. His ,wife, poor woman, is at work. Her work is shirt work, at 2d. per shirt. She must make six before she can obtain fuel enough to last three days; and thus they exist during the Christmas week—that bitter cold, yet blessed week. I might thus sketch case after case, and the half of the suffering consequent upon this inclement season would not be told. In the district in which I reside^ there are 500 or 600 families, in which, mote or less,.scenes like those which 1 have just described may be daily witnessed. And yet these people remain quiet. I think it marvellous that it should be so. I ascribe it under God to the endeavors whichare being made on every hand to educate, and instruct, and moralise the poor.

Henry A. Flowers.

75, Silver-street, Stepney Green, Jan. 17.

Turn we now from England in Europe to British India in Asia. Here financial matters are not in that bright state so joyously heralded in the quotation at the head of this article. We copy the following from the Telegraph and Courier, an Indian paper of so late a date as February 12th, for which we beg to express our obligations to a friend in Nelson. FAMINE. The famine in the Not th-West Provinces continues unabated, and the sufferings of the people are said to be dreadful. The upmost efforts are however being made to contribute to their relief. Bombay has already subscribed £7000 for this purpose, and similar movements are being mode in the other large cities ot the empire. It is singular that within four years the residents of the North-Western Provinces have been called on to put up special prayers—in time of Pestilence, in time of War and Tumult, and in time of Drought and Famine. Now from the four districts to which famine wns at first confined it has spieiid to the Punjab, the wheat-field of the North-West, where ' there is no prospect of a spring harvest. The form i which relief should chiefly take is that of pouring grain from the abundant into the starving districts. The extent of the misery will be lessened by every pound of food-grain sent to the NorthWest. All other means will but raise prices, and make the traders hoard their stores in expectation of a further rise. Famine has, we are sorry to learn, also manifested itself in the Carnatic. Accounts horn Trayancore give a most harrowing

picture of scarcity prevailing,'and of the misery of the people. The prospects of the Punjab are more encouraging, rain having fallen plentifully from Peshawur to Loodiana. The report of the secretary to the Punjab Relief Fund states there is not yet much distress anywhere to the north of Delhi, nor in that city itself, where the Municipal Fund and private subscriptions afford extensive relief: but in the southern part of the Delhi district and in Goorgaon the distress is very severe. At this latter place the deaths from starvation are reported at from 400 to 500 daily, and the number is said to be increasing in Hisaar, Sirsa, and Rohtuck. Worst of all, there is but too much reason to fear that, in the words of one of the Commissioners in the JVorth-West, 'the distress is yet at its commencement in the event of no rain.' In spite of the utmost and most unceasing endeavors Government and the public can make, it lVto be feared that thousands must perish. Heaven alone can avert the dire visitation, although much may be done by man to mitigate its severity.