Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 May 1889 — LONDON’S LEGIONS OF POOR. [ARTICLE]

LONDON’S LEGIONS OF POOR.

There Are at Least 300,000 of Them in a Pi table Condition. London Star. The poor are always with us now. They are always in the East End—but what is more satisfactory, they are beginning to make their appearance in Westminister. By an extraordinary and unheard-of coincidence in the history of what is facetiously called “the people’s House,” we had actually two discussions on the same night on the daily lot of the mass of toilers who make London what it is for themselves and for others. We could actually spare an hour or so from the consideration of affairs in Zanzibar and Samoa, from the expenditure of the people’s money, from the thousand and one subjects which touch the popular interest about as to talk about the wants and rights of the majority of London workers. That is good, though not so good as it might be. The House talked much, but did nothing. It is indeed capable of doing little. It is the smaller elective institutions from which the long looked-for dawn of hope from the democracy will come—from the Ground Rent Committee which is about to inquire into the price-*-about fifteen millions —which TKepeople of London pay for the privilege of working in it, and to solve the problem as to how the fruit of the aggregate toil of the great city can be appropriated to the necessiites of the many instead of to the luxuries of the few. ” There were plenty of facts given yesterday. But we don’t want facts. Facts crowd in 'Oh us. There are three hundred thousand of the very poor in London. That is a noimal state. These people are never properly housed, never properly fed, never properly rested. After they leave childhood they have no leisure. In the bad times they suffer actual starvation, relieved by the charity of their neighbors. Out of the half-million inhabitants »f the Tower Hamlets nearly ninety thousand are too poor to live. Twenty shillings a week is an average wage. A fourth of this is spent in rent. At least 16s. 4d., as Mrs. Barnett shojvs, ought at the lowest figure to be spent on food. . But if all that is spent, there is only 3s. Bd. forthe rent instead of 55., and there is nothing—positively nothing—for coals, clothes, boots, club money, schoolings and'illnesses. That is the normal condition; but loss of employment is always a factor with the unskilled laborer, who has often to fight a daily battle for his daily bread, and who—because there are more people in London every year, and the landlords take care that there shall be no more land—must, before he can even begin that struggle, pay a twenty-five per cent, premium to the land monopolist. This is the London of to-day. What may the I<ondon of tomorrow be—in war, under new commercial conditions, such as may arise in the attempt to diminish the cost of production and enhance the price of the production—with less work for the laborer and more for him to pay for his bread, his salt and his coal? What a prospect is thia that civilization offers its children!

Wanamaker’s Opportunity. ‘‘Did it ever occur to you,” raid a dry goods man the other day, “what a great "boom John Wanamaker’a wholesale business must be having nowadays? There are some sixty or seventy thousand Pose Offices in the country, and I suppose that fifty thousand of them are in small country stores. Don’t you think that when John Wanamaker’a drummer comes round to one of these stores he has a pretty good chance of getting an order? I’ll bet that there are not a hundred such Postmaster storekeepers within a thousand miles of Philadelphia who do not buy all they can of Wanamaker’s nowadays, and even in more distant parts of the country the Postmasters will stretch a point whenever they can, to send to Philadelphia for their goods. Suppose a man wants to be reappointed, don’t you think he wiH imagine that it will be a good thing for him to be able to refer Postmaster-General Wanamsker to Wholesale Merchant Wanamaker for information as to bis credit and business standing. Of course the Postmasters in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred will be wrong in it, but they have the idea all the same that Wanamiker will know the name and all about evory man who buys goods of him, and they will act accordingly. It will be Wanamaker's own fault if he hasn’t the largest wholesale business in the country within the next four years.”