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7
Suffice it to say, that mentally, morally and
physically the unemployed of yesterday, is not only
the unemployable of to-day, but what is far worse, he
and his and all that they get, are filling our most
densely packed and congested areas with crowds of
weaklings, as stunted in physique as they are dwarfed
in intelligence and physical capacity.
Degenerate, and incapable alike of high responsibility
or sustained individual effort, they could in
hundreds of cases be properly described as partial
wrecks of what a people should be, rather than the
efficient citizens of a great Empire.
Every thinking man must deplore the fact that it
is from this stock we are breeding in ever increasing
numbers, burdening the ratepayer in money, and
exerting all our scientific knowledge and effort to
keep alive the unfit and inefficient by endeavouring
by every means at our disposal to pull down and
reduce the undue proportion of their heavy infantile
mortality.
Unless some speedy solution of the unemployment
question is devised, and a consequent general improvement
of the condition of the masses promptly
inaugurated, one shudders to contemplate what the
conditions will be like, after another two or three
generations of poor town bred population.
It is your province, gentlemen, to consider these
things and to devise the something that shall provide
some real beginning at putting a stop to what on