NBWTA Report 1903-050
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94. stand and how we stand, and what 95 is our future. In the late war, out of eleven thousand young men who volunteered at Manchester for service, eight thousand were found unfit to carry a rifle or to undergo the fatigue of discipline ; and of the three thousand who were accepted, only 1,200 measurements required by the exhibited the muscular power and chest military authorities. There are many causes at work to produce this state of things, but the most prominent factors are undoubtedly the housing of our people in great cities, and the amount spent upon strong drink, they simply exist by cutting down the level of subsistence to a point that is dangerous and disastrous to physical, moral, and intellectual efficiency ; and the most serious of all our social problems to-day is that we are perpetuating generation after generation of men, women and children for whom the standard of life is so low that it is physically im- possible for them to return to the community well equipped for the social service which the community has a right to demand from all its citizens. InDusTRIAL Tur STANDARD oF FooD AMONG OUR WORKING According to the accredited estimates, there are six million working- class families in the United which of £162,000,000 Kingdom, we have and, as we have already seen, out on drink, spent in one year We have also got to 108,000,000 was spent by the working classes. consider that there are 14,000,000 children under the age of fifteen years, and that about 17,000,000 people drink little or no alcohol, and of the remaining 23,000,000 people more than half Erriciency ACCORDING CLASSES. are women, and therefore the seriousness of the figures becomes all the more apparent. Physiologists are all agreed that there is no sanitary necessity more real or more urgent than the need which every individual shares for a Now no one will for sufficiency of good, wholesome, nourishing food. a moment pretend that the diet of an indoor pauper is an extravagant diet to set as the standard for an ordinary robust man and woman and their family, and yet if you dissect the expenditure which has been placed before you it is absolutely impossible for the average working-man and his family to feed themselves on the same standard of diet at the same expenditure as that of an indoor pauper and yet to Now if we maintain the average expenditure upon alcoholic drink. take the expenditure of a working-class family—a man, his wife and three children—and feed that family upen precisely the same diet at the same cost as that which the indoor pauper of St. Pancras Workhouse is being fed upon to-day, giving him the same diet and giving his wife and children only one-half of the diet at half the cust of the indoor pauper, it would be necessary to expend upon that family alone for food no less But it is impossible than 16s. 1d. per week to obtain a pauper’s diet. for the average working-man to feed himself and his family at even that standard so long as he spends the average of his class upon alcoholic Forinstance: 16s. per week, at the standard of the indoor pauper drink. to-day, added to the sum of 6s. a week for alcohol (which is the average of his class) amounts to 22s. a week for those two items alone, which absorbs more than the entire family income of one million and a third persons in the city of London to-day, and then you would not have left a single penny for rent, clothing, and the thousand and one incidental expenses that go to make up the domestic economy of the working- They do not manage ; How is it that people manage? man’s family. To Mr. EDISON. Now industrial efficiency is the vital question in our international compétition, otherwise we shall fail in our race for life. We do not stand as a nation to-day where we stood thirty years ago; we have no longer unchallenged supremacy in the competition of the world’s markets. We have the countries of Europe, such as Germany, Belgium France, and even Russia, transforming themselves from an economic point of view, while we have an unprecedented competition from across the seas, for the American workman is the most formidable industrial competitor we have to-day. He is the best educated, the best nourished the best equipped at the present time. Not long ago I had the honour of passing a day at the house of the great inventor, Mr. Edison, and in the course of conversation I asked him, having that morning gone through his vast laboratories, as to the efficiency of the different nationalities whom he employed. ‘Who are your best workmen?” I said. ; “The Germans and the Italians,” he answered, “are good routine 4 workmen, but I can depend upon them for little else. The English and ; the Scotch are remarkable, but I can never count upon their services. 3 They do not return punctually to their work after holidays, neither is 4 their hand steady, nor their eye accurate, for the simple reason that 9 they drink alcohol, and drink it often to excess. A Connecticut “ American-born workman is the only absolutely reliable man I have, th he 1s not only a total abstainer himself, but he comes of a total », abstaining ancestry, and I can depend upon his accuracy and steadi- (ness, Upon the time he will put into his work, the hours at which he will return, as I cannot do with the workmen from the old country.” We cannot blink the fact that the United States to-day consumes per head of the population, only half the amount of alcohol that we, the British people, consume per head of the population, so that in addition to the material advantages which the American people possess, we have further handicapped ourselves by doubling our expenditure upon the doubtful luxury of alcoholic drink. Now we have only two courses open to us, one is that we should resolutely and effectively face, as a nation, this supreme necessity, and deal with the source of weakness that is sapping our industrial efficiency or most assuredly we shall fall behind in the commercial struggle. |