The temperance problem and social reform / by Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell.

  • Joseph Rowntree
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The temperance problem and social reform / by Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of a child in the St. Pancras Workhouse Schools. This, be it remembered, is for a family of five persons only (ze. husband, wife, and three children). In the innumerable cases where there are more than three children in a family, the level of subsistence must fall still lower. ‘‘How is it done?’ it may be asked. The answer is simply that it is not and cannot be done. If one-fifth of a limited income be spent in drink, economies must be practised somewhere, and since rent, reduced to its lowest limits by unwhole- some crowding, remains an inflexible quantity, food must be stinted, and expenditure upon clothing, fuel, etc., reduced to limits that are not only relatively, but absolutely, destructive of efficiency. We have no wish to labour the point. The facts are too ominous for more than bare statement, but they claim the gravest attention from those who desire to estimate the conditions of social well-being. They do not constitute the whole of the social prob- lem, but they certainly represent one of its most serious elements. RELATION OF STANDARD OF Livina TO INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY. If we look at the question from a merely industrial point of view, its gravity is sufficiently apparent. The economic position of nations is, to a large extent, one of food and of standard of living. ‘ Wherever we see peoples and classes descending in their diet below the standard necessary for a moderate labourer, or barely reaching that limit, we may be confident that in the fight for work these peoples and classes will never fill but an inferior function, and will not
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