Nelson Chronicle, Colne Observer, and Clitheroe Division News. — 1891-04-10 (Nelson, Lancashire, England)

EXISTENCE OF POVERTY.  No person who keeps his eyes open in his own ' town, and who acquaints himself with what is going on, and with the condition of people in the country, can have the least doubt that there is a 1 great deal of deep, bitter poverty and hardship in I our highly civilized and professedly christian country. Rosseau, a great French writer of this century, held that to live in a state of nature, or barbarism, was preferable to civilization. He said there were few wants, no anxiety, perfect freedom and health in this state of nature, none of which are to be found in civilization. This is to some extent true, but the life of the uncivilized is altogether lower and narrower. It is the contentment of man as an animal, and not as a developed man. Civilization is the natural destiny of man, and the enfranchisement, elevation, and refinement of all his powers. Nevertheless, as one very important writer observes, there are people in the very heart of our civilization, so poor, so wretched, that the veriest savage could not afford to exchange position with them. This writer says—" It is my deliberate opinion that if standing on the threshold of being, one were given the choice of entering on life as a Terra del Fuegian, a black fellow of Australia, an ' Esquimeaux in the Arctic Circle, or among the lowest classes in such a highly civilized country as Great Britain, I would make an infinitely better I choice in selecting the lot of the savage." I think this is quite true. There were, I think, fourteen tabulated deaths in London from starvation last year. Coroner's juries brought in this verdict. But there were thousands of people over whom no inquest was ever held, who died from diseases generated by insufficient food and clothing, and intense I anxiety. The pauperism of this country is terrible. A poor woman a short time ago jumped into the Thames to drown herself. A policeman who was near rescued her. But she begged him to let her.l drown, and said the world was far too cruel to live in. There are a great number of suicides through poverty, and it is well known that mothers indirectly slay their children to get the burial or insurance fee. And all this in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and in the wealthiest city of the world—in a city where thousands of pounds are spent on the old world pageantry and mummeries of Lord Mayor's shows. But there is another larger body of people not in starvation, but in difficultyand deprivation. These men find that it is absolutely impossible with their wages to keep themselves and families with sufficient food and clothing, and with respectable homes, and so week by week they are pinched and deprived, not of luxuries, but of necessaries, or else they have to get in debt. They cannot properly feed the bodies nor train the minds of their children or preserve their morals. This is most ',prey a very serious state of things. Men surely should be able to live on their labour, and if they cannot without constant deprivation and half-starvation there is something radically wrong, criminally, cruelly wrong somewhere. This is the condition of vast masses of the working people of this country. Life has little liberty, pleasure, and enjoyment for them.