THE LONDON UNEMPLOYED.

Waikato Times, Volume XXVI, Issue 2164, 22 May 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE LONDON UNEMPLOYED.

A Lonhov piper thus describes a meeting vi the unemployed in London :— A thousand hnagiy workmen were sitting in Holborn Town Hall, drinking in with "eager ears the theories and appeals which shattered a great Stato into atoms less than a- century »K°, aud less than a hundred miles away "Theories" — The render laughs at the woid. So did some uf Cirlylc's compar ions one night, and the sage said: "The French nobles] lnughud at ' theories,' at the end of the } last century, hut a man came and wrote j a little hook about the theory of social contracts— and their skins went to bind the second edition of it 1" So Citizens Hyndm<in and Champion and Burns and Fielding have preached their theories often enough before, aud nothing has come of it. In the crowded Town Hall there were just three till hats— all of them at the reporter's table. Row upon row the unemployr-d sat, packed much closer than their moro fortunate fellowcreatures would consent to sit, hands in pockets, hats over eyes, and across the faces of many of them, in simple, sober fact, the grisly word "hunger" plainly written. They seemed mostly of the better class of unskilled labourers, with a considerable proportion of artisans among them. And their behaviour was hungry too. At the beginning of the meeting somebody ventured upon a slight interruption. Inntantly the hall rose at him with a howl— no jocular cries of " Turn him out !'' like the political meetings, but just one inarticulate howl that silenced him as completely as if he had been shot. •« A l* lanterne 1" WM whit it meant.