ted about new schemes for housing the poor not
paying! Why, everything connected with the poor from the cradle to the
grave is a source of good profit to some one, if not to themselves.

Let a housing plan be big enough and simple enough, and I am certain
that it will pay even when it provides for the very poor. But old ideals
will have to be forsaken and new ones substituted.

I have for many years considered this question very deeply, and from
the side of the very poor. I think that I know how the difficulty can
be met, and I am prepared to place my suggestions for housing the poor
before any responsible person or authority who would care to consider
the matter.

Perhaps it is due to the public to say here that one of the greatest
sorrows of my life was my inability to make good a scheme that a rich
friend and myself formulated some years ago. This failure was due to the
serious illness of my friend, and I hope that it will yet materialise.

But, in addition to the housing, there are other matters which affect
the vigour and virility of the poor. School days must be extended till
the age of sixteen. Municipal playgrounds open in the evening must be
established. If boys and girls are kept at school till sixteen, older
and weaker people will be able to get work which these boys have, but
ought not to have. The nation demands a vigorous manhood, but the nation
cannot have it without some sacrifice, which means doing without child
labour, for child labour is the destruction of virile manhood.

Emigration is often looked upon as the great specific. But the
multiplication of agencies for exporting the young, the healthy, and
the strong to the colonies causes me some alarm. For emigration as at
present conducted certainly does not lessen the number of the unfit and
the helpless.

It must be apparent to any one who thinks seriously upon this matter
that a continuance of the present methods is bound to entail disastrous
consequences, and to promote racial decay at home. The problem of the
degenerates, the physical and mental weaklings is already a pressing
national question. But serious as the question is at the present moment,
it is but light in its intensity compared with what it must be in
the near future, unless we change our methods. One fact ought to
be definitely understood and seriously pondered, and it is this: no
emigration agency, no board of guardians, no church organisation and no
human salvage organisation