The Daily News. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20. "MERRIE ENGLAND."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 164, 20 October 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20. "MERRIE ENGLAND."

It is notable that political refugees, deL throned royalties, the discredited Croesus, 1 and those who can still finger a banknote are received in the '"land of the i free" with hospitality. It is notable ' also that in a city like London where the 1 police every night-arrest dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of starving people, there exists in view of these people evidence of the greatest wealth the world owns. It is, known that the fat hound and the oveTfed horse are better cared . for than thousands of Britons who ► "never shall be slaves," that 'organisa- ► tions exist for giving people who ought [ to be adequately fed every day a great ► gorge once a year and that nobody takes ► any notice of a pauper's funeral. ► ''Rattle his bones, over the stones, * He's but a por pauper, whom nobody owns." -jSaid Mr. Lloyd-George, Chancellor of thte Exchequer:— '•I never realised the poignancy of poverty until I had to administer the old-aga pensions." "If poverty's his crime, let mirth from out his heart be driven. It is the dealiest sin on earth and never is forgiven." The Chancellor showed that of the 420,000 adults—nearly half the entire population of New Zealand—who died annually in Britain, five-sixths had no-property at all! But a more terrible indictment of the cruelty of the wealthy lies in another fact presented' by the Chancellor, that £300,000,000 was willed each year in Britain, and that half of this belonged to two thousand of the total of the* deceased. In Britain it is common enough for fat persons who have never lacked anything to fulminate about the shocking wastefulness of the man with a pound a week. The Chancellor mentioned that "civilised" countries spent annually five hundred million pounds in machinery of war. There die in poverty each year more men, women and children—than -would be slain in the . greatest naval war. Mr. Lloyd-George, unlike most former British statesmen, has repeatedly put his finger on the cause of British poverty. There are millions of aeres devoted to the pleasures <of their owners, while the people who have been driven to congested cities starve in festering dens. The Chancellor is himself responsible for the initiation of legislation that is already slightly minimising the disparities. Territorial nabobs are selling out their ancestral estates because the Budget has made it necessary for them to pay a larger proportion of their unearned incomes. Violent protests about the rights of great owners have not prevailed against the counter protests that the poor have no- , thing and that therefore the rich should have a little less. Mr. Lloyd-George men- • tioned that 50 per cent, of British Army recruits were rejected for physical unfitness. This points only to the decay of the race in the crowded centres from whence the majority of the applicants come. They come, not because they want to be soldiers, but because there is sure food and clothes and lodging in the Army. It is the last hope in a country whose great landholders do not recognise the right of the poor to live. The poor physical condition of intending Army recruits is no criterion of the physical condition of the nation. It is merely a demonstration of the fact that young potential male paupers look upon the Army as a place where food is obtainable. The pauperised element in Britain is too spiritless to revolt, and the whip of the classes has been applied so long that poverty seems natural and ineradicable. The rich can never understand that it is sinful to walloV in luxury while the poor die of starvation, and the poor anticipate no better end for themselves than a pauper's grave. If the great middle-class of Britain were on the side of the masses there would be hope of betterment, but the great middle-class ' is busy imitating the upper-class, and its efforts to relieve poverty are sporadic and feeble. The under-dog at Home has hitherto been doomed because the upperdog held hereditary wealth, power and privilege. This power and privilege have been fought for little more than half a century. When the routine of social life is bred into the bone of the people I generation after generation it is difficult even for a Lloyd-George to eradicate its cruelties in a few years. Dispossession of territorial magnates is the only real hope for the massed paupers of Britain.