AMERICAN UNEMPLOYMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 9 April 1928, Page 7

AMERICAN UNEMPLOYMENT

TOTAL REACHES EIGHT MILLIONS SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN STATES. (From Our Own Correspondent.) Wellington, April 4. Senator Shipstead’s statement, appearing in a cable message from Washington to-day, to the effect that there are over eight million people unemployed in the United State's at the present time, gives some colour to a picture of American industrial and social conditions supplied by a correspondent writing from Philadelphia only six or seven weeks ago to a relative here. “Conditions in America right now,” he says, “are indeed very bad—industry slowed down to minimum production, money scarce, poverty and.distress very acute. Polities are so rotten and corrupt that the whole national structure is undermined and apparently about to collapse. Something assuredly is going to happen ere long. A social and political unheaval that will effect drastic changes in the vital affairs of the nation. There are hundreds of thousands of unemployed. There is practically no home life in the States, merely a family abode, invariably a tenement or apartment house, identical in appearance with its thousand neighbours, just, a place to sleep and eat.” Apparently all this is written with some knowledge of America and its people, but some of the allusions to social life in tho States are well-nigh incredible.

A paragraph or two may be quoted without comment and necessarily without endorsement. “The auto, the movies and prohibition,” this authority continues, “have sure put this country on the toboggan. Since the war no morals or ethics abide. To be up-to-date here one must not be hampered by scruples or conventions, but be ever on the alert, and a presidential campaign impending it is no good augury for the immediate future. Practically all the vast natural resources and wealth of the nation are in the hands or under the control of a few gigantic trusts. Th© people of the country are becoming more impoverished yearly, and less independent. People here live a fast and strenuous life, travelling at so high a speed and living eo artificially that they ar© almost automatons. Everything, and almost everybody, is standardised to taka advantage of circumstances legitimate or reprehensible.”

And so on and so on. The only comment to offer is that if this correspondent is correct in his estimate of the American people, New Zealand has been extraordinarily fortunate in the few thousand representatives of the race it has harboured from time to time.