THE ARCHIBISHOP OF YORK ON SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1882, 23 April 1889, Page 3

THE ARCHIBISHOP OF YORK ON SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

Speaking at York, at the annual meeting of the York Association for the Care of Young Girls, the Archibishop of York said that political economy represented society as a kind of commercial warfare within closed lists. Ever since the days of Adam Smith, however, they had been discovering that there were other factors in the combination, and that it was not a game with closed lists, but that there stood outside the wholesome game of competition the rejected branches of their social system; the girls who could not work, orphans that could not do anything, and the persons able-bodied enough, who for a time were cast out because production bad outstripped consumption, and a great many manufacturers were obliged to be idle. There was growing up a state of facts grave, serious, and tragical, threatening society itself unless it could be dealt with, which must be included in ihe survey which any political philosopher took of the world, and that was the existence of the class who were in danger of being starved. What did the meetings in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere mean I There must be something underlying all that. Our civilization was developing a large class of persons who from first to last were not sure of a meal or of the common needs of life. Our statesmen, because they knew no remedy, took care to have as little to do with the matter as possible. Conslant over-production and overpopulation would make that dangerous class larger. His own opinion was that in two generations there would be a state of matters deplorable in itself, dangerous in itself, dangerous to the whole social system, and eminently calling upon every one to exercise his wits and bis thoughts to devise some remedy or a palliative. They might preach thrift lo the laborer, I and if the labourers of this country practiced it they would be richer by the millions spent upon drink, but the danger was that they praached a partial remedy only. The question was what they would do when capital was accumulating, and accumulating in greater masses than ever in single hands, whereas labor was growing poorer, and there were more thousands, more millions of men growing up who had no property, aud who were not sure that

their labor could bo brought to the market at all. There was a problem which nobody yet had solved, which would be the agony and struggle of the next generation and generations after that. Such societies as that he was addressing were trying to raise up the low and the fallen, whereas the ordinary work of society threw them out and then trampled on them and sent its wheels over them. They were trying to set right what political economy had, necessarily perlupa, left wrong ; they were trying to help those who could not help themselves, and he maintained that there was nothing to which the strictest political economist could object in thejthinga that they did.