Chapter VII
The Reform of the Poor Law¹

Sidney Webb

Few persons appear adequately to realise the political instability of the existing system of Poor Law Relief. Its present administration is a nicely balanced mean between the indiscriminate generosity of the Old Poor Law and the scientific rigour intended by the more extreme advocates of the New. The present equilibrium, by which the total amount of pauperism is, at any rate, kept from increase, is the result of the almost innumerable experiments of the great measure which Lord Althorp in 1834 triumphantly piloted through a bewildered House of Commons.² That measure, carried by the Whig respect for the metaphysical economists of the time, and by the argumentative power of the great Report of 1834, has never received the support, or even the assent, of the great mass of the wage-earning class, now for the first time becoming effectually enfranchised. It did more than anything else to promote the growth of militant Chartism. For fifteen years after its enactment the popular clamour never ceased against the iron bonds in which the Reformed Parliament had encased the nation's collective provision for the destitute and the infirm. Then came, leaping and bounding, the time of relative prosperity and political subsidence of the English proletariat, and a new generation grew up, to whom the Old Poor Law, like the enclosed commons and the lapsed charities, was but a vague tradition of extinguished public rights. But such traditions linger long and bitterly; and the agricultural labourer, in particular, still sullenly resents his dependence on the good pleasure of an absentee board, composed of his masters, for the weekly dole of outdoor relief which forms his almost inevitable portion in old age. The town unskilled labourer, in his chronic condition of winter unemployment, demands with even stronger persistence that his appeal shall not be met merely by an offer of ' the house,' or of the stone-yard, and it becomes increasingly obvious that popular feeling cannot be relied upon to uphold any rigid refusal of outdoor relief even to able-bodied adults.

The possibility of a renewed popular attack on the system of Poor Relief would not be serious if reform could be left to Poor Law experts, or confined to persons who have read the great Report of 1834. But the Poor Law expert is now somewhat discredited among democratic politicians, owing to his ignorant adherence to an obsolete political economy, and his blind refusal to recognise the general abandonment of that individualism which so long formed the ideal of middle-class Liberalism. In these days of Marshall and Sidgwick, people who still talk about the ' wage fund/ and the ' terrible ' increase of population,³ are as much out of date as that dwindling remnant which still resists on principle any extension of public administration.

The average member of Parliament, on the other hand, knows nothing of Poor Law administration, and has but the vaguest idea of the Report in 1834. He is easily led by the growing social compunction of the age to acquiesce in anything promising a more generous treatment of the poor. He will not attempt the task of a Poor Law Amendment Bill, but he may probably vote in Committee on the next Local Government Bill for an amendment giving Parish Councils discretionary power to grant outdoor relief, or some other proposal equally likely to land us once more in the demoralising horrors of the Old Poor Law.

Even the Poor Law experts do not agree in defence of the existing system of Poor Law administration. There is indeed a widespread feeling among them — a feeling which will be shown to be entirely justified — that a sweeping reform is required.

The fact is that the New Poor Law has by this time worked itself out. The main evils against which it was directed have now virtually disappeared. The chief objects of the Commissioners have been attained. No one acquainted with English history or Poor Law work will, for an instant, depreciate the enormous reform effected by the Act of 1834. No one can doubt the good which the bracing system initiated by that Act has done in the way of educating the people in the intelligent and self-respecting ordering of their own lives. But the work has so far succeeded that the evils to be encountered to-day are not those with which the reformers of 1834 had to deal. Standing on their shoulders we have to-day a different task from theirs. In that creation of individual character, which is the real goal of all collective effort, the time has come for a new departure.

The Poor Law Commissioners of 1834 found a system of Poor Law relief which virtually made every labourer a pensioner of the landowner, without either the labourer or his employer being in any way pecuniarily benefited by the subsidy. Of the serious demoralisation which this was causing it is unnecessary now to speak. The ' allowance system ' and the ' labour rate ' are probably responsible, jointly with the ' white slavery ' inaugurated by the great industrial revolution, for most of the degeneration of character of that ' residuum ' whose condition even that optimistic statistician Sir. R. Giffen declares to be ' a stain on our civilisation.'⁴ The New Poor Law aimed specially at abolishing outdoor relief to the able-bodied, and it has, after sixty years' patient effort by thousands of Poor Law workers, practically succeeded in accomplishing this great task. The adult male paupers in receipt of outdoor relief, who are classified as 'able-bodied' in the Returns for the 1st of January 1897, numbered, in all England and Wales, only 13,910, and of these 9356 were relieved on 'account of their own sickness, accident, or infirmity.' Only 789 were relieved ' on account of want of work, or other causes,' and 131 'on account of sudden and urgent necessity.'⁵ The abolition of outdoor relief to able-bodied male adults is virtually complete. The able-bodied women in receipt of outdoor relief are more numerous, but still number less than 55,000 in England and Wales, two-thirds of these being widows with young children.

Other recommendations of the Commissioners have been equally successful. The central Poor Law authority has been of enormous use in securing a uniform administration of the law. The educational and charitable endowments have been to a large extent reformed. The hideous old law of bastardy has been amended. The absurd litigation as to settlement has been practically stopped. Probably no State Paper has ever had so great a result, or has so uniformly secured the assent, so far as regards the particular issues dealt with, of those competent to weigh the points at issue.

The New Poor Law has, however, failed to extinguish pauperism and destitution. It succeeds in obviating any but a few cases of direct starvation, but it does not prevent a widespread demoralisation of the pauper class. It often fails to rescue the children from a life of pauperism, and the aged from public disgrace. More important than all, it fails utterly in its chief and most important purpose, of encouraging the thrifty and the worthy, and discouraging the spendthrift and the drunkard. It is, indeed, now coming to be denounced by experienced philanthropists as the greatest of all the existing hindrances to English thrift and providence, and an instrument of serious degeneration of character among the English poor.⁶

One school of Poor Law Reformers, strong on Charity Organisation Society Committees, but scarcely represented at all on the hustings, aims at the ultimate abolition of all public provision for destitution. Its members either believe, with Cobden and W. J. Fox, that individual prosperity can be so universally diffused that our workhouses will fall into ruin, or else they look forward to a return of the mediaeval millennium in which all almsgiving was left to the voluntary goodwill of the individual citizen, spurred on only by the teachings of the Church.

Here all democratic reformers at once part company with those workers who aim at nothing short of the total abolition of the Poor Law and the Poor Rate. The complete abolition of poverty and want is absolutely impossible (until we reach Communism itself) in a land of accident and sickness. The substitution of private philanthropy for the public provision for our poor citizens (already emphatically condemned by Bentham), is decisively negatived by modern Radicalism. The Eleusis Club Report of 1889 — a remarkable document published by the well-known working men's club at Chelsea — is very clear on this point: —

We believe that all poor relief should be administered under the fullest public responsibility by freely elected public bodies. We therefore believe that any attempt to substitute the organisation of voluntary charity for public relief would prove disastrous because: —

(a) The history of hospital and church charities shows that any such voluntary method, however carefully guarded in the beginning, is more likely to result in waste and jobbery than a system of public control.

(b) The fact of relief depending on the voluntary gifts of the wealthy, encourages the notion that the industrious poor owe the means of livelihood to the existence of a rich and idle class.

(c) All the evils, such as improvidence and idleness, which may be produced by public relief, are intensified in the case of private charity.

Moreover, it must not be forgotten that no scheme which aims at the abolition or diminution of the present revenue from Poor Rates can gain the support either of the public or of the political economist. These twelve millions sterling, virtually a share of the rental of the country, are, as Professor Marshall says, as much the property of the poor as their wages, and no proposal can be for a moment admitted which contemplates the absorption of this tribute by the landlords or the middle class. National insurance or Poor Law Reform can alike be but suggestions for the better administration of the collective revenues of the poor — the modern substitute for the monastic endowments, the mediaeval charities and the common lands.

Those who talk glibly about the abolition of the Poor Law can hardly have any correct idea of the extent and character of the pauper class to-day. It seems to have been assumed by the authors of the Act of 1834 that real destitution might fairly be regarded as an exceptional and accidental state, and that the awful permanence of the pauper class was merely the result of the demoralising old system. Pauperism, as we are often told in Poor Law Conferences to-day, is a ' disease,' produced by injudicious administration; the implication being that it can be ' stamped out ' by a due course of ' resolute government' This idea constantly recurs in Harriet Martineau's Tales, which did so much to spread the principles of the New Poor Law. It is encouraged by the optimistic statistics reiterated by the Local Government Board, which used annually to show: ' That the mean number of paupers relieved in the parochial year ending at Lady Day 1889, was smaller in proportion to the population than in any other parochial year included in the table. It amounted to 795,617, or a thirty-sixth of the estimated population.'⁷ This optimism had lately been slightly shaken by the statistician noticing that the decline of pauperism had stopped. In 1896-97 the mean number in receipt of relief had risen to 814,887. Including Scotland and Ireland, the total becomes over a million.

A million of our fellow-citizens in pauperism is scarcely a quantite négligeable, and is not a hopeful result of over sixty years of as resolute Poor Law Government as we are at all likely to get. But that is not the whole tale. It has been pointed out over and over again that the Local Government Board statistics of pauperism, and especially the references to ' one thirty-sixth of the population ' are misleading. They record merely the number of persons in actual receipt of Poor Law relief on one particular day. But Poor Law relief is now usually given for short periods at a time, and a large proportion of those who become paupers during any one year are not in receipt of relief during the whole of the year. The plan of granting relief only for short periods at a time is steadily becoming general.

In 1857, the Local Government Board did give statistics of the number of separate persons (not cases) who, during the year, were paupers at one time or another. The total was found to be $3\frac{1}{2}$ times the number for one day, and this calculation has since usually been accepted. Hence, instead of 2.8 per cent, we get nearly 10 per cent of the population, or at least 3,500,000, as the class actually pauper during any one year.⁸

This is not the worst aspect of the case. While a man or woman is in the prime of life, and free from sickness or accident, it may be assumed that pauperism is relatively exceptional. The appalling statistics of the pauperism of the aged are carefully concealed in all official returns. No statistics are given by the Local Government Board as to the percentage of aged paupers. No information was given on this point, even in the census of 1 88 1. Although the occupations at each age were then obtained, the Registrar-General discreetly and humorously merged all paupers over sixty in the class ' retired from business,' so that the enriched army contractor and his aged work-people were combined to swell this one category.

In 1885 Canon Blackley found that in his parish 37 per cent of the deaths of persons over sixty, during fifteen years, had been those of paupers. He obtained returns from twenty-five other rural parishes, and found that 42.7 per cent of deaths of persons over sixty were those of paupers.⁹ Returns obtained by the present writer in 1890 from twenty Unions in England, selected entirely haphazard, and including metropolitan and provincial, urban and rural districts, show the following results: —

If we may assume these Unions to be fairly representative of the whole — and the results coincide closely with those given by other tests — it would follow that out of the 817,190 persons simultaneously in receipt of Poor Law relief in England and Wales, on the 1st of January 1889, there would be 325,000 over sixty-five, and 212,000 over seventy years of age. At the census of 1881, the percentage of persons over those ages to the whole population was 4.57 and 2.64 respectively. Among the estimated population on 1st January 1889, of 28,628,804, there would accordingly be about 1,309,000 persons over sixty-five. One in four of these is a pauper. There are approximately 7 5 6,000 persons over seventy. Of these two out of seven are permanent paupers. Of the 325,000 paupers over sixty-five, about 215,000 get outdoor relief; of the 214,000 over seventy, about 135,000 receive this weekly dole; the remainder are in the workhouse infirmary, or aimlessly gazing at vacancy in the dreary ' idle room ' of the workhouse itself.

Extending these statistics roughly and hypothetically to the United Kingdom, with its million of simultaneous paupers, and its 38 millions of population, we find about 1,700,000 persons of sixty-five years of age, of whom about 400,000 are permanent paupers; and about 1,000,000 persons over seventy, of whom 260,000 are permanent paupers.¹⁰ Other statistics go to confirm this broad result.

In London one person in every four will die in the workhouse, hospital, or pauper lunatic asylum. In 1895 out of 85,601 deaths in London, about half being over twenty, 13,089 were in workhouses, 8230 in hospitals, and 357 in lunatic asylums, or altogether 21,676 in public institutions.¹¹ Moreover, the percentage is increasing. In 1887 it was 20.6 of the total deaths; in 1888 it rose to 22.3; in 1895 it reached 25.2. The increase was almost exclusively in the deaths in workhouses and workhouse infirmaries. Considering that comparatively few of the deaths are those of children, it is probable that one in every three London adults will be driven into these refuges to die, and the proportion in the case of the ' manual labour class ' must of course be still larger. The number of persons who die whilst in receipt of outdoor relief is not included in this calculation.

Nor is there much hope of appreciable reduction in these figures. The proportion of paupers to population has remained practically stationary for the last twenty years.¹² The steady diminution in the number of able-bodied adults relieved is counter-balanced by an equally steady growth in the number of sick persons and lunatics, for whom collective provision is now made, as well as apparently by a slight rise in the number of the children and the aged. We may for some time to come reckon on having to make constant public provision for the needs of a million people in receipt of relief, representing a pauper population of at least two millions. It accordingly behoves us to see that this collective provision is as far as possible prevented from having demoralising or other injurious effects. The collective provision may of itself be demoralising to character and detrimental to the best interests of the recipients. But as we cannot get rid of it, we must endeavour to minimise whatever evils are inherent in the system. We need not add to the assumed objective demoralisation of the collective provision any unnecessary subjective demoralisation due to public stigma or disgrace. So far as is safe we must depauperise our paupers. The whole range of Poor Law experience up to 1834 appeared to show that public boards could not be trusted to discriminate between individual cases, and the cast-iron rigour of the New Poor Law was the inevitable result. What we have been learning since 1834 is that discrimination must be more and more exercised between classes of paupers, not between individual cases, and that any Poor Law reform must necessarily proceed on this basis.

Now, in the classification of the permanent pauper class we cannot do better than follow the quaint categories set down by a kind of ' Mansion House Council 'in 1553, which was set on foot by the ' good young King Edward VI.' when he had been moved by a sermon of Bishop Ridley's to write to the Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Dobs, as to some means of relieving the poor. The Lord Mayor and the Bishop got together a committee of twenty-four, and (as Holinshed records)¹³:

In the end, after sundrie meetings (for by meane of the good diligence of the bishop it was well followed), they agreed upon a booke that they had devised, wherein they first considered of nine special kinds and sorts of poore people, and those same they brought in these three degrees: —

1. The poore by impotencie are also divided into three kinds, that is to saie:
1. The fatherlesse poore mans child
2. The aged blind and lame
3. The diseased person by leprosie, dropsie, etc.
2. The poore by casualtie are of three kinds, that is to saie:
1. The wounded souldier.
2. The decaied householder.
3. The visited by greeuous disease.
3. The thriftless poore are three kinds in likewise, that is to saie:
1. The riotor that consumeth all.
2. The vagabond that will abide in no place.
3. The idle person as the strumpet and others.

We have hitherto been so impressed with the danger of increasing the number of the ' thriftless poor,' that we have managed to exercise a degrading and demoralising effect on ' the poore by impotencie,' and the ' poore by casualtie.' We ought now to try a bolder experiment in what is necessarily our great collective laboratory of individual character. The time has come when we ought to aim at the maintenance and improvement of the character of the aged, infirm, and orphaned poor, rather than content ourselves with the mere repression of ' the vagabond that will abide in no place,' and ' the idle person.'

The former classes must, as far as possible, be removed out of the demoralising circle of the Poor Law system, which might then easily be maintained for the latter in even greater rigour than at present. With this view the following proposals are submitted for discussion as a possible scheme of Poor Law Reform: —

I. State Pensions for the Aged

The Poor Law Commissioners did not, in their great Report of 1834, recommend the withdrawal of outdoor relief from the aged or the infirm. The common impression that they advocated the total abolition of outdoor relief is incorrect. The whole drift of their conclusions is against any subsidy in aid of wages; but they did not regard collective provision for old age as any real allowance in aid of wages, in the sense of wages being likely to be higher if no such provision were made. Modern economists cannot do otherwise than confirm this view.

No determined attempt has accordingly been made, except in London, Manchester, and a few other places, to abolish outdoor relief to the aged, and the statistics already quoted appear to prove that at least one-fourth of the people who attain the age of sixty-five, are compelled to resort to the relieving officer for that bare subsistence upon which they linger out their lives.

Nothing can be more discouraging to thrift and providence than our present practice in such cases. When a man is absolutely destitute we provide for him a bare subsistence. If he can manage to save, by the time he is sixty-five, as much as £150, he can provide for himself and wife practically as well as he and she would be provided for if they had saved nothing at all. Once past that minimum, there is every inducement to save which ' gentility ' and independence can offer. Anything short of that minimum is virtually of no use at all. Poor Law relief cannot legally be given except to the absolutely destitute, and the aged domestic servant, or farm-labourer, who has accumulated £$0, must dissipate that small hoard before his future will be secured from want.¹⁴ The man who has a shilling a week from his friendly society is legally no better off than he who has nothing.¹⁵ Both must be just kept alive, and legally neither can demand more.

Now the virtual minimum which enables an aged couple to dispense with poor law relief is far beyond the reach of a large proportion of the population. Instead, however, of encouraging them to save as much as they can towards their support, we, in effect, discourage them by making them no better off than those who save nothing at all.

Would it not be better frankly to recognise the provision of a minimum pension for old age as a collective charge? Every person must necessarily pay rates and taxes in one shape or another all his life long. It seems desirable to promote in every way the feeling that ' the Government ' is no entity outside of ourselves, but merely ourselves organised for collective purposes. Regarding the State as a vast benefit society, of which the whole body of citizens are necessarily members, the provision of pensions to the aged appears to be an obvious expansion of the Democratic idea. The German scheme of national insurance,¹⁶ the proposals in England of Canon Blackley, the pension experiment of the Whitechapel Guardians, and the growing feeling in favour of greater generosity to the aged paupers, are alike signs of the drift of public opinion in this direction.

At present we give a superannuation allowance to about 200,000 retired civil servants, military and naval officers and men, policemen, postmen, etc. The system is being extended to elementary school teachers and nurses and to municipal and Poor Law officials. In all these cases the pension is given practically as a matter of right; it is granted in addition to whatever may have been saved by the recipient; and it carries with it no stigma of public disgrace.

We also give what are virtually superannuation allowances to over 300,000 aged paupers, besides workhouse accommodation to over 100,000 more. In their case the pension is awarded as of grace on the part of a committee of those who are often regarded as their life-long industrial opponents; it is only awarded where there are no savings, or where the savings have been consumed; and it is accompanied by public opprobrium and legal disqualification for the duties of citizenship.

The result in the first case is to encourage thrift and saving to supplement the pension, without the slightest demoralisation of character. The result in the second case is absolutely to discourage thrift and saving, and to break down whatever character had survived the losing fight of life. If we intend to give pensions to our aged poor, as we virtually now do, had we not better do so in such a way as to improve rather than to injure their character, and in a manner calculated to promote rather than to discourage their thrift?

This proposal must not be confounded with schemes of national insurance. The poor of this country will never vote away the poor-rate. The free and independent elector will never submit to the ' regimentation,' identification, and restrictions on locomotion which any scheme of general insurance must necessarily involve. No Government is at all likely to attempt to collect compulsory insurance premiums from men already supporting their trade unions and friendly societies, their benefit clubs and their building societies, and paying, moreover, a not inconsiderable poor-rate. Nor is there any reason for any such collection. The expenditure and the revenue sides of the Budget ought economically to be kept distinct. If aged pensions are desirable let us have them. When the funds come to be raised, let this revenue be obtained according to the classic economic maxims of taxation. It is pretty clear that these maxims will yield no support to the imposition of what would be virtually a new poll-tax.

If any payment at all is required in consideration for the aged pension, it must, as the Rev. W. Moore Ede suggests,¹⁷ only be as a test of thrift, and a means of improving character. The aged pensions might, at first, be granted only to those persons who (although not in possession of a large income) could show that they had made some attempt partially to provide for their old age. ' It is worth notice that a large number of those compelled in their old age to resort to the workhouse have made ineffectual efforts at thrifty provision for their declining years. In 1881, out of 183,872 inmates of workhouses (one-third being children, and another third women) no fewer than 11,304 had been members of benefit societies. In 3913 cases the society had broken up, usually from insolvency.'¹⁸ Some public authority, not connected with Poor Law administration, if this is practicable, might be allowed to grant, in lieu of Poor Relief, public superannuation allowances to persons over sixty-five years of age, who had absolutely retired from work, whether destitute or not, who were not notoriously of bad character, and who could show that they had made some continued efforts of thrift, in any form whatsoever. The possession of small savings, continued subscription to a friendly society or club, insurance in the Prudential or other society, or lengthy membership of a trade union, co-operative or building society, might all be accepted as relevant evidence of providence. But the object of the measure would be defeated unless the thrift condition were made easy enough to be satisfied by the poorest class of labourers, of merely average foresight and strength of character. At present we fail to encourage thrift because we stigmatise all as semi-criminals who fall below a quite impossible standard. If we really desire to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to strengthen such as do stand, we must pitch our requirements so as to be within reach of their attainment. Those who do not then fulfill them might be left, as at present, to the tender mercies of the Poor Law. But as those tender mercies are purposely degrading, and consequently demoralising, it should be our object to rescue as many persons as possible from them. It will at first be contended by members of the Charity Organisation Society on the one hand, and by the officials of friendly societies on the other, that any such public provision of honourable pensions would seriously discourage and thwart the efforts now being made to create private superannuation funds. There is, however, good reason for supposing that this would not be the case. At present these efforts are hindered by the futility of subscribing for anything short of a pension adequate for maintenance.¹⁹ Anything less than this amount merely goes in aid of the rates, by reducing the amount of relief required. But once let the public pension be independent of other means, and it will become worth while to subscribe for an annuity of even sixpence per week. The great hindrance to thrift at present is the hopelessness of being able to save enough. With a minimum pension assured, even the smallest addition becomes worth providing. If membership of a friendly society, or a life insurance policy, carried with it almost a certainty of an honourable State pension, instead of degrading Poor Law relief, the strongest possible encouragement would be given to the admirable efforts now being made by the existing popular agencies for thrift,²⁰ which are already doing so much for the more prosperous of our artisan classes. At present they do not succeed to any extent in providing for old age. Their benefits for sickness absorb practically all the available savings of the poor. The cost of providing adequate pensions is found to be too serious for the great friendly societies, and for any but a few of the more powerful trade unions.²¹ But small additions to the public pension could at once be made attractive to tens of thousands who could never aspire to obtain even ten pounds a year.

There is a further direction in which these public pensions would encourage individual effort and the creation of character. Nothing is more brutalising than the manner in which the grown-up children of paupers are virtually encouraged to treat their aged parents. The Guardians have the greatest possible difficulty in obtaining contributions from sons towards the maintenance of their pauper parents. The money is given grudgingly, because it merely saves the rates. But once let it become possible for the poor, as it is for the middle-class and the rich, to soothe and comfort the declining years of their parents by those small gifts which cost so little and mean so much, and we may have at least a chance of awakening those filial feelings which go far to humanise and elevate personal character. If a son's assistance to his State-pensioned father or mother means the addition of tobacco or tea to their bare subsistence, that assistance is a great deal more likely to be given than when it means merely the reduction of his parent's cost to the parish. We deliberately dry up and starve at present one of the most promising means of developing the higher feelings of the poor.

Some persons will be frightened at the cost of providing any widespread system of aged pensions. It must, however, be remembered that the proposal involves really no new expense to the community. The aged poor are in any case maintained at the cost of the able-bodied workers, and the substitution of pensions for Poor Law relief is merely a readjustment. It may be assumed that in the United Kingdom to-day there would be about 1,700,000 persons over sixty-five. Of these probably 200,000 already receive public pensions of one kind or another, and about 500,000 are in receipt of Poor Law relief, costing, on an average, about £\2 each annually. What proportion of the others would be eligible for and would apply for a pension, it is impossible to predict. But even if the pension of £10 per head were made universal (and there is much to be said for this proposal), the extra cost involved would almost be covered by the appropriation to this service of the tax on tobacco, which is not likely otherwise to be allowed to remain as a permanent feature in a Democratic fiscal policy.

If the pension were made payable at seventy years of age, only $2\frac{2}{3}$ per cent of the population would be alive to claim it, or just a million for the United Kingdom, of whom at least 300,000 are already paupers, and perhaps 100,000 public pensioners. The extra charge involved would, in this case, probably not exceed the tea duty.

But a beginning might be made by sanctioning a certain number of pensions every year,²² within a fixed limit, the number being gradually increased so as to absorb more and more of those who would otherwise end their days as paupers. It must never be forgotten that the object of the pension system is not so much the comfort of the individual pensioner as the stoppage of the degradation and demoralisation of the existing pauper class. The main object is to encourage the salutary discipline of individual thrift by removing the present hopelessness. We must put water into the pump in order to make it draw.²³

II. Efficient Education for the Children

As the State undertakes to fulfil all the duties of parentage to over 50,000 children (this is the average number of indoor pauper children; 33,000 of them are actually orphans), and prevents, moreover, any interference of their relations in the matter, it is clear that the State is bound, as a matter both of morality and public policy, to ensure that these duties are fulfilled in the very best possible manner. The Government should, at any rate, set, as a parent, a good and not a bad example.

The grim principle of the 1834 Commissioners, that the pauper's ' situation, on the whole, shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the labourer of the lowest class,' cannot be held to apply to orphan children, if the situation of the children of the lowest labourer be such as to be below the level of nurture and education adequate to prepare them for the struggle of life. To manufacture paupers wholesale inside the workhouse, merely because individual parents are doing so outside, has proved too stupid even for the scientific Poor Law pedant, and a vast improvement has taken place in the care of indoor pauper children.

In the best managed institutions little further can, indeed, be suggested so long as we retain the system of herding children in great institutions at all. In the Forest Gate schools, for instance, the elder girls are taken out to market, and taught to buy the provisions which they will afterwards cook for dinner in the separate cottage homes. The boys are often taught shoemaking, tailoring, or the use of some musical instrument. All the girls are put to domestic service. Only about 200 orphans are annually sent to Canada, where they can start in life clear of all old associations.

Boarding out is still restricted, both by its limitation to orphan or deserted children, and by the difficulty of securing efficient supervision, but the 3778 boarded out on 1st July 1888, had risen to 6498 in 1897, and, in the great majority of cases, were found to be well cared for.

The facilities for boarding out and emigration, now confined by the order of the Local Government Board to orphans and deserted children, might well be extended to other pauper children, whose parents consented to their being so dealt with. It is even suggested by experienced Poor Law workers that the children of permanent indoor paupers might equally be boarded out, just as they are now sent away to the Poor Law school, without their parents' consent. There is, moreover, much room for improvement in the care of pauper children in the smaller Unions. The indoor pauper children, instead of being herded together in pauper barracks, or crowded in gigantic ophthalmic workhouse schools, as they are in all but a few exceptional institutions, need, if they cannot be boarded out, to be allotted in comparatively small parties in ' cottage homes,' to the care of ' house-mothers.' In the words of the Eleusis Club Report, they should 'be kept free from any pauper taint, sent if possible to mix with other children in good public elementary schools,²⁴ and carefully taught some trade or useful occupation, by which they can fulfil the duties of good citizenship, incumbent on them as on others.' The apprenticeship of pauper children to such practically unskilled trades as hair-cutting, or the placing of them out as errand-boys or farm -labourers, ought to be definitely abandoned.

Their elementary education requires, too, considerable improvement. 16,216 children were in Metropolitan workhouse schools in 1886-87. Out of these only 359 were in Standard VI. (only 221 of these passed). The inspector deplores ' the bad classification of the older workhouses; the poor and imperfect furniture and appliances provided for educational purposes; the low salaries given, preventing the highest grade of teachers applying for vacant schools; the want of technical skill, and of the ability to impart practical knowledge on the part of industrial trainers; and the narrow view too frequently taken by Boards of Guardians and managers of utilising the industry of the children.'²⁵

Ten years have passed since these words were written, and hardly any progress has been made in the elevation of the Poor Law Schools. These remain, even in favourable examples, still far behind a London Board School.²⁶

Surely the Education Department might be empowered to insist on these public schools being raised to at least as high a level as an ordinary Board school. It does not seem too much to ask that every child of which the State assumes the duties of parentage should be given, up to fourteen, the best elementary education possible, followed by apprenticeship to some highly skilled trade, so as to ensure that every workhouse child becomes a skilled instead of an, economically speaking, ' unskilled ' recruit to the labour market. All this is, however, already within the powers of the Guardians under the existing law; what is needed is the proper spirit and energy in its administration.

III. Collective Provision for the Sick

Few persons realise how rapidly we are 'municipalising' our hospitals. In the rural districts, the workhouse infirmary is coming to be more and more accepted as the proper home of the wage-earners who are seriously ill, and the prejudice against the removal of the patient from the family is gradually giving way before the improvement of the public hospital. In London in 1889, where our magnificent voluntary hospitals, 78 in number, provided about 6415 occupied beds, the 27 Poor Law infirmaries and 'sick asylums ' had 9639, and the eight hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board 1820, a total of 1 1,459. Nearly two-thirds of our Metropolitan hospital accommodation was therefore provided from public funds. Since that date the publicly administered institutions have greatly increased, whilst the irresponsible and ' voluntary ' hospitals have remained stationary or even diminished. Probably three-fourths of the ' occupied beds ' are now paid for out of the rates.

Nothing could be more advantageous from the public point of view than that every case of serious illness should be treated in hospital. It is to the public interest that the worker should as quickly as possible recover his health and strength, with the least possible burden to his relations. The great advance in medical treatment during recent years has been in nursing and in antiseptic treatment, neither of which is possible in a crowded home. The isolation of infectious disease is an obvious public gain. But when 80 per cent of our households are those of manual wage-earners, when in our great cities. 30 to 40 per cent exist in single rooms, and as many more in two- or three-room tenements, neither isolation nor proper nursing are possible in the home. The treatment of the sick must necessarily become more and more a matter of collective provision, and it is fortunate that the subjective demoralisation, which we have done our best to attach to it, by making (in London) two-thirds of the inmates technically paupers, is dying away before the common sense of the doctors and the patients. It was stated to the House of Lords' Committee that, ' in consequence of the excellence of the treatment in these infirmaries, and their separation from the workhouse, the poor are so ready to resort to them that there is a tendency to regard them as a kind of " State hospital," entrance to which does not imply that the patient is a pauper.'²⁷ This excellent discrimination seems so horrible to the Birmingham Guardians, that ' they have determined to make all persons who come to their infirmary pass through the gate which leads to the workhouse grounds, so that they may not draw a distinction between the workhouse and the infirmary.'

This sapient instance of the deliberate ' pauperisation ' of those free from this taint is characteristic of far too much of the existing Poor Law administration. We are often so intent on reducing the cost of the collective provision for our poorer brethren, that we even prefer to make that provision as demoralising to them as we possibly can, on the chance that we may thereby exclude (to their detriment and occasional starvation) some of the more dignified among them.

As regards medical aid, however, public opinion is now running too strongly in the other direction to be resisted. By section 7 of the Diseases Prevention (Metropolis) Act 1883, treatment in the magnificent public hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board is not deemed ' parochial relief.' In 1884, Parliament provided that the receipt merely of medical relief should not disqualify a man for exercising the franchise. In the next Parliamentary Registration Bill, a clause will inevitably be carried, which few members of Parliament will dare even to resist, defining 'medical relief to include treatment in a Poor Law Infirmary or Sick Asylum. Why, moreover, should we deprive a man of the educating dignity of citizenship because he has had the misfortune to have his wife or child compulsorily removed from his care as dangerously insane, and remitted to a public lunatic asylum?

The question of outdoor medical attendance is less obvious. It may still be possible, by means of provident dispensaries and friendly societies, to enable all persons of ordinary thrift to provide for medical aid in the simple ailments of life. It may, therefore, be desirable not to hinder this spontaneous co-operation, where it exists, by an undue extension of gratuitous medical attendance at the public expense. But there is, in principle, every reason to prefer a frank communism throughout this department of public service, if only public opinion would accept it without subjective demoralisation. The one and only aim in every case of sickness ought to be the quickest possible restoration of the patient to health, and we might well cut our way entirely out of the ' nexus of cash payments ' in this if in no other matter of public interest.

The existing distinction between the voluntary and the rate -supported hospital cannot possibly be maintained. There is the most urgent need for the introduction of some order and system into the barbaric chaos of London hospital administration. What appears to be wanted is the complete separation of medical and hospital relief from the Poor Law system. In large cities, the provision for the sick needs classification according to the kind of disease, rather than according to the haphazard distinction of how each particular institution is maintained or administered. We require in London a Central Hospitals Board, managing all public provision for the sick and the insane, and auditing, supervising and controlling all ' voluntary ' hospitals. Such a Board would relieve the London County Council of its burdensome care of lunatic asylums, and take over the hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board as well as the workhouse infirmaries and dispensaries. In other counties, it would probably be found sufficient to give similar powers of hospital management and control to the existing ' Asylums Committee ' of the County Council, thus removing all provision for the sick from any contact with Poor Law Administration.

IV. Public Burial of the Dead

It is part of the imperfection of the existing Poor Law statistics that none exist as to the number of pauper funerals.²⁸ The proportion of these to the total deaths must, however, be very large. Many persons are buried by the parish who were not in receipt of relief when alive. If I 5 per cent of the deaths in London are those of persons actually in the workhouse or Poor Law infirmary; if over 25 per cent die in some public institution or another; if in the rural districts 30 to 40 per cent of the deaths of persons over sixty are those of paupers; if 2 5 per cent of those over sixty-five are permanent paupers; it is probable that at least one-third of our funerals are already paid for from Poor Law funds.

To be ' buried by the parish ' is felt by the poor to be a disgrace and a dishonour to a greater extent than can easily be realised. The aged labourer, who will rely without shame on the parish doctor, use without disgrace the Poor Law dispensary or infirmary, and even accept without much dishonour the bitter bread of outdoor relief, revolts against the pauper funeral, and starves himself to hoard the sum necessary to avoid this last humiliation. Yet so hard and so demoralising are the conditions of life of the great mass of the population, that it seems probable that at least one-third of them fail to maintain even this ' final rally on the narrow ledge ' of dignity and self-respect, and are eventually carried down to a pauper's grave.

There is, of course, nothing necessarily degrading in a public funeral. In the case of a soldier, or a sailor, a priest, or a member of a religious order, the collective provision for burial is accepted as a matter of course. It is merely that we have deliberately chosen to make this particular form of public funeral — the lot of one-third of our brethren — an additional anxiety during their lives, a source of bitterness during their last moments, and a stain of disgrace to their relations. We have failed in our effort to abolish the public funeral, and have succeeded merely in making it one more pang to the dying, and one more engine of demoralisation to the living. Has not the time come for depauperising our parish funerals? We do not even take the trouble to make the burden easy to the poor. We charge unnecessary and irksome fees for the mere privilege of burial; we permit, in some cases, an absentee rector to levy a toll on all burials from his district, wherever and by whomsoever performed; we allow the provision of cemeteries to become, in many places, a matter of private speculation, and a source of unnecessary individual gain; and we leave the sorrowing household to bargain with a tradesman for their means of performing what is essentially a public duty. There seems no reason why the collective organisation of the people should not be utilised to minimise the trouble and expense of the sepulture of the dead.

In Paris the whole of the cemeteries are public property, and the whole of the funerals are conducted by what is virtually a public organisation. The Company of ' Pompes funebres ' is chartered and subsidised by the municipality, and works under its supervision and control. Funerals are provided according to a definite scale of charges, varying from nothing to the highest amount demanded by Parisian taste. It does not seem an impossible dream that we might one day ' municipalise ' our undertakers, expanding the existing ' Burial Boards ' into a complete municipal department for interments, the minimum charge being fixed low enough to enable even the very poorest to enjoy the luxury of paying something for the last offices to the loved dead. We might facilitate, instead of obstruct, this final effort of self-respect.

But there is much to be said for going a step further. The expenses of burial must necessarily be shared among the living, and Death knocks at the door of every household, on an average, once in ten years. It is a question whether we could not more conveniently ' pool ' the necessary minimum costs, and spread the charge over these years, instead of each family meeting it at the time. To quote from a suggestive pamphlet of the Fabian Society²⁹:—

Why should we add to the trouble and economic disturbance necessarily incident to death by levying a toll on burial? The disposal of the dead is a matter of common concern; the fulfilment of this public duty presses crushingly on the poor in their hour of greatest need; 'communism in funerals' is not likely to lead to reckless increase in the demand for graves; and any simplification of the extravagant expenses now incurred in the matter would be a great boon.

'Free burial' would, moreover, enable the total abolition of infant insurance, with its accompanying evil of infant murder. No valid plea for the insurance of children would remain if the need for individual provision of funeral charges were obviated.

V. — Abolition of the Casual Ward

For the first 200 years of its history, indeed, during the whole era of the Middle Ages, Poor Law legislation aimed at repression more than at relief,³⁰ and we must, to-day, not forget the necessity of undertaking the reformation of sturdy rogues and vagabonds.

Many otherwise good people have a most immoral belief that all paupers belong to this class. They forget that one-third of the paupers are children, one-tenth insane, and one-half infirm, aged, or disabled adults. Less than one-tenth are classed as able-bodied adults, and of these three-fourths are women, mostly deserted or widowed mothers, with families demanding all their strength. Only $1\frac{1}{2}$ percent are classed as usually adult able-bodied males, and even as to these the Local Government Board explains that they include ' those relieved (1) on account of sudden and urgent necessity;

(2) on account of their own sickness, accident or infirmity;

(3) on account of the sickness, accident, or infirmity of some member of the family, or of a funeral; and (4) on account of want of work.'³¹ The number of vagrants relieved is only about 13,000, and the total number of 'sturdy beggars' profiting by the Poor Law must be altogether infinitesimal to the population. Nevertheless, this parasitic class exists in demoralising, and latterly, it would seem, in increasing numbers, moving gaily from one ' Queen's Mansion ' to another, until their faces become perfectly well-known to the superintendents.

The existing casual wards appear, indeed, to be permanent foci of moral infection. Filled almost exclusively by habitual tramps, they serve at present merely as the support and increasing degeneration of a hopelessly parasitic class. No relaxation can safely be made in their rigorous dreariness, lest it immediately lead to an influx of inmates eager for the relative luxury. The few innocent persons who drift into the casual ward from sheer lack of shelter are almost inevitably drawn into the eddy of its evil current, and become permanent casuals. The only reform that can be suggested is the total refusal to recognise or provide for the 'poor traveller,' now become obsolete; the admission to a ' Reception Ward ' of any destitute person, and his searching individual examination there; the stern and rigorous commitment to a penal ' labour colony ' of every recognised habitual casual; and the prompt discharge, after performance of a reasonable task of labour, of the merely destitute labourer, who should be in every possible way assisted to obtain employment. We might certainly take as much trouble to save human lives from the shipwreck of permanent pauperism as we do to prevent the loss of ships and cargoes on our coasts.

For the chronic cases of sturdy vagrancy, idle mendicity and incorrigible laziness, we must have recourse to organised pauper labour, strictly disciplined and severely supervised. These classes, like the criminals, are the ' failures ' of our civilisation; and while they must be treated with all just kindness, and offered opportunities of earning their subsistence, they must nevertheless be sternly denied all relief until they are willing to repay it by useful labour. The present Poor Law system fails to deal with them, and all reformers demand further public action. Mr. Charles Booth urges that we must ' open a little the portals of the Poor Law, or its administration, making within its courts a working guild under suitable discipline,' and eliminate the idle loafers from society by making their existence in the ordinary community more and more impossible, whilst we, on the other hand, offer them constantly the alternative of the reforming ' Labour Colony ' to which all incorrigible vagrants and beggars could be committed by the magistrate for specified terms on the indictment of the police or poor-law officer.

There need be no fear that the Democracy will deal tenderly with these fraudulent claimants upon its purse; once provide generously and wisely for all in whose cases the relief is neither dishonourable nor demoralising, and the residuum may safely be treated with scientific rigour.

VI. Reform of Poor Law Machinery

No Poor Law administration will, however, be stable until those responsible enjoy the confidence of the public, now effectually destroyed by the defective manner of their election. The reform of the administrative machinery of the Poor Law is therefore a matter of vital importance, especially in the metropolis. Indeed, it is probable that this side of the problem will force itself upon the notice of Ministers long before they can be induced to deal with the equally urgent reforms already referred to.

The administration of the Poor Law is committed to 647 boards of guardians, acting for 647 aggregations of 14,827 parishes. In London there are 30 boards of guardians acting either for separate parishes (14), or for 'unions' (16) of smaller parishes. The 'overseers of the poor,' appointed by two J.P.'s, have become practically obsolete as to function.

In 1890, when this paper was written, the electoral system of the Poor Law was a public scandal. The boards of guardians were mainly elected by the ratepayers (either annually or triennially in the month of April, according to the particular arrangement in force for each parish) upon a system of plural voting, each elector having from one to six votes, according to the rateable value of his house. Owners were entitled to vote as well as occupiers, and might even vote by proxy, and an occupying owner could give double votes. If, moreover, he was rated for more than one house, whether as a ' house farmer ' or not, his voting power was further multiplied in proportion to the number of his houses. Under this system it occasionally happened (as in Bethnal Green in April 1889) that a minority of the large householders prevailed over the poorer majority. The elections were conducted carelessly, voting papers being left at each house by a policeman, and collected next day, without any safeguards against personation or fraud. Very little public interest was aroused, and only a small proportion of the papers were filled up.

Justices of the peace in any parish were ex-officio members of its board of guardians, but they seldom attended. The Local Government Board might, and in some cases did, nominate additional members. The bulk of the work was left in the hands of the paid officials, and the ' clerk to the guardians' — frequently a local solicitor — was often an official pluralist (as in Chelsea) receiving huge emoluments, and practically beyond control.

We need in our Poor Law representative government 'one man one vote' on the County Council Register, uniform triennial elections, exclusion of all J.P.'s, and other nominated members, abolition of rating qualification, election arrangements on the lines of those for the School Boards, and under the Corrupt Practices Act (but allowing, as now for parliamentary elections, though not for municipal elections, meetings, etc., in working men's clubs), and removal of the alleged disability of women under coverture to be guardians or electors of guardians.³²

Each board of guardians now administers relief, and collects its rates independently of the others; but in London the cost of the maintenance of the poor inside the workhouses, infirmaries and schools, the salaries of Poor Law officials, and the expenses of vaccination, are defrayed from a ' Common Poor Fund,' and divided amongst the parishes in proportion to the rateable value of their property.

The burden of London's poor cannot perhaps be safely wholly shared among London as a whole, in the simple manner in which the cost of London's Elementary Education is apportioned. Nor can the charge for the poor be made a matter of national finance. The grant of Poor Law Relief is necessarily so much a question of local discretion in administration, that local responsibility for excess is necessary to prevent local waste or extravagance. Each locality must be left to bear its own charges, wherever those charges are incurred for relief granted, except in the exact manner and under the general rules laid down for the common guidance. But the principle of the Common Poor Fund can safely be extended, as regards London, so as to throw upon the central metropolitan authority (besides all its own expenditure) the minimum cost per pauper of all relief granted strictly upon the principles prescribed by it, the minimum cost per pauper of local administrative expenses, the whole cost of guardian elections, and the whole of those numerous charges now thrown upon the local poor rate, but expended by the guardians in pursuance of Act of Parliament, or by other public bodies uncontrolled by them. The 'equalisation' of all these charges would still leave undiminished all existing checks upon local extravagance in the grant of relief.

But any equalisation of the London poor rate requires an efficient central authority, and Mr. Pickersgill's Bill, which received considerable support in the House of Commons in 1889, was inadequate in its recognition of this need. The metropolis sadly needs a central ' Board of Guardians ' to manage such part of its Poor Law affairs as requires unity of administration, and to ensure the extinction of the demoralising inequality of treatment which thirty separate administrative boards in one city can never fail to produce. Mr. W. M. Acworth³³ asks, for instance, with regard to the casual wards:

Why should it be left to the local guardians to decide what task should be set, at what hour discharge should take place, whether the task should first be completed or no, whether the ward should be cellular or associated, for on all these points the widest discrepancies exist at the present moment? At one ward habitual casuals enjoy, without the necessity of an entrance fee of fourpence, all the jovial freedom of a common lodging-house. A short distance off the discipline is so stern that the place is shunned by every one except the bona fide wayfarer, who is unacquainted with the character of the various establishments. ,

At present, too, the patients in the Poor Law Infirmaries at Marylebone and St. Pancras cost £40 and £50 per patient respectively, whilst those at Wandsworth and Mile End cost little more than half this amount. The thirty-nine separate London workhouses have at present each to provide sufficient separate accommodation for about ten distinct classes of inmates. It is, therefore, not surprising that they fail also to discriminate in their classification between the worthy and the unworthy, the innocent and the hardened. Unity of administration would enable, not only much stricter classification and educational discrimination, but also a relaxation in the treatment of the aged and the worthy, along with sterner discipline in separate establishments for the less deserving classes. The financial economy of amalgamation, in space, in time, and in money, need only be mentioned.

No reformer would, however, for a moment propose to add any functions or powers to London's only Poor Law organisation, the Metropolitan Asylums Board, which possesses all the electoral and some of the other vices of the late Metropolitan Board of Works. Practically all authorities agree with Mr. Acworth and the Rev. S. A. Barnett in urging the creation of a single Poor Law Council for London, which, like its County Council and School Board, must spring exclusively from the direct election of the people. The election might take place triennially, in the years following those of the County Council elections. The Poor Law Council should retain for itself all power of deciding the principles of administration and of poor relief, delegating to local committees of almoners only the duty of administering and granting relief upon those principles. It would naturally take over all the powers, duties, and property of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, except such as were transferred to the proposed Central Hospitals Board, and also the administration of all workhouses, casual wards, and Poor Law schools. The London Poor Law Council should be placed as near as may be practicable in the same position as regards independence as the London County Council and School Board. Its accounts would still be audited by the Government auditors, and its action strictly confined within its parliamentary powers, but the discretionary authority over the London overseers and boards of guardians, now vested in the Local Government Board, might safely be entrusted to it, as well as other powers of the latter overgrown department.

Outside the Metropolis it appears unnecessary to make any immediate alteration of Poor Law machinery or change in Poor Law areas. The existing 647 Poor Law Unions cannot be disturbed without the most serious readjustments of property, debts, officers, rates, and official machinery. No one would propose to transfer them to the county councils, which are quite unfitted for the detailed examination of individual cases which should form the leading feature in Poor Law administration.

Nor can Poor Law administration be made wholly parochial. The 15,000 parishes in the United Kingdom cannot possibly each have its workhouse, its infirmary, its lunatic asylum, its casual ward, and its labour yard. The parish council may well be empowered to remit cases to the appropriate union institution, and possibly act as a local consultative committee to the board of guardians of the union, and to the public authority administering the aged pensions, but further than this no experienced Poor Law worker would desire to go. To allow the parish council to grant outdoor relief would promptly land us in all the demoralising horrors of the Old Poor Law, and to make each parish maintain its own poor would bring back all the absurdities of the old Law of Settlement, with the inevitable results of 'closed parishes,' demolition of cottages, compulsory removals, litigation, inter-parochial envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. We must therefore retain, outside London, the Poor Law union with its board of guardians, reformed as to election, the members paid their reasonable travelling expenses, and relieved of their present medley of sanitary and educational functions, at last set free to devote themselves entirely to their task of worthily administering the collective provision for the poorer citizens.

The foregoing tentative proposals for Poor Law reform all proceed, it will be seen, on the lines of ' depauperising,' wherever safely possible, the present collective provision of the community for its weaker members, and of ' democratising ' the machinery of its administration. They do not profess to form a complete scheme, dealing, as they do, neither with the ' unemployed ' nor the constant Poor Law problem of the widow with young children. No doubt they will strike many people as wild and extremely dangerous. There are those who will say that it is unnecessary to propose any change in the present Poor Law system, and unwise to suggest far-reaching schemes of possible reform. There are others who will prefer merely to await an expression of the popular will, before even discussing the question. Both classes will, it may with some confidence be suggested, be neglecting the lessons of Democratic history.

We now see that it was a common error to suppose that the introduction of machinery must diminish the demand for industrial skill. The change which rendered valueless various forms of obsolete dexterity has called into existence a much wider range of higher class labour. It is equally erroneous to imagine that the approach to complete political Democracy is enabling us to dispense with statecraft. It is the fashion of the cynic to describe politicians as mere clerks and servants of the popular will, because their action is necessarily shaped by its voice. True statesmanship, however, will recognise that political Democracy merely changes the terms of the problem. Instead of ignoring the popular desires, as Metternich did, or of dazzling, flattering, and evading the popular will, as (let us say) Lord Palmerston did, it is now the task of the statesman to discern the real aspirations of the ' dim inarticulate ' multitude, and to guide and interpret these into safely effective political action.

The main requisite of this task of contemporary statesmanship is political prescience. What it is important to know is, not what the people to-day ask for — that is obvious enough — but what they are going to ask for next year. Once the popular demand has found definite form and general support, it becomes increasingly difficult for even the greatest statesman to modify its course. Resistance, even when well argued, does little more than inflame the agitation and injure the influence of the conscientious opponent of the popular will. The duty of the statesman is always to be at least ( six weeks ahead ' of the people's voice; to foresee the coming demand; to occupy the public mind with a well-devised scheme for carrying out the swelling aspiration; and so to obviate the general support of impracticable, ineffective, or unsafe plans, taken up merely because no better had been in time suggested.

To be able to head off the crowd from a dangerous course the statesman must, from the outset, be continually-leading them towards the same end, but by safe paths. Democracy is like the House of Commons — it will follow if it is led, not if it is merely resisted. If the Democratic ship is to be steered it must be kept under weigh, and at a good pace; and he who wants to do the steering must know whence the next gust of wind is coming, and not doggedly turn in its teeth.

It appears increasingly probable that we may be on the eve of as great a revolution in Poor Relief as those of 1782 and 1834. Whether this change will be for good or for evil in its effect upon national character largely depends on the manner in which our public leaders meet the popular will.

Notes

1. Contemporary Review, July 1890. ↩
2. Only twenty members voted against the Second Reading ↩
3. See Industrial Democracy, part iii. chap. i. ' The Verdict of the Economists.' It is interesting to notice that, as far back as 1587, all the evils of the day were ascribed to the ' too great store of people in England, and that youth, by marrieng too soone doo nothing profit the countrie, but fill it full of beggars, to the hurt and utter undooing (they saie) of the commonwealth.' See William Harrison's ' A Description of England ' in Holinshed's ' Chronicles,' p. xxxiv. of Mr. Furnivall's preface to Elizabethan England. ↩
4. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. p. 350.↩
5. Annual Report of the Local Government Board 1896-7, C. — 8583 of 1597. ↩
6. See Thrift and Independence, by Canon Blackley; Mackay's The English Poor; the Charity Organisation Society's publications, passim; Fawcett's Pauperism; Dispauperisation, by J. R. Pretyman; The Better Administration of the Poor Law, by W. Chance; and the evidence given before the Select Committee on National Provident Insurance, H.C. — 270 of 18S5. ↩
7. P. lxi. of C—5813. M ↩
8. National Income, by Dudley Baxter, p. 87; Dictionary of Statistics, by M. G. Mulhall, p. 346. This statement, based on the best information then accessible, at last broke through the self-complacent optimism of the Local Government Board, and resulted in further inquiries being made. These inquiries, which are described in Mr. Charles Booth's Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age (London, 1892), and the Aged Poor (London, 1894), appear to indicate that the hitherto accepted multiplier of $3\frac{1}{2}$ per cent was too high. The return presented to Parliament in June 1893 gives the 'year's count' of separate persons relieved in England and Wales during 1891-92 as 1,573,074, excluding pauper lunatics and vagrants. Taking these at 100,000, we get a total of 1,673,074; and adding an estimate for Scotland and Ireland, we reach an estimated aggregate total for the United Kingdom, of the class obtaining relief during any given year, of at least 2,000,000. ↩
9. Report of Committee on National Provident Insurance, p. 159 of H.C. 208. 1886. ↩
10. Here, too, further inquiries were set on foot after publication of this startling statement. The statistics thus obtained have been elaborately analysed by Mr. Charles Booth in the two works already cited. The result is to show that my estimate of old-age pauperism was actually too low. Mr. Charles Booth states (The Aged Poor, p. 420), that ' the whole number of those over sixty-five relieved in the twelve months was 401,904. Of these, 114,144 had relief indoors, and 287,760 outdoors, including in the latter 25,477 who are returned as having medical relief only.' These definitely ascertained statistics refer only to England and Wales.
    
    We may now put the ' year's count ' of paupers over sixty-five in the United Kingdom as certainly exceeding 500,000; or more than a fourth of all the persons who have reached that age. At least 300,000 of them are over seventy years of age, being 35 per cent of all the men and women of that age. ↩
11. Fifty-eighth Annual Report of the Registrar-General, 1 895, C. — 8403 of 1 897. These figures are understated, as the tendency is more and more to remove public institutions of this character outside the London boundary. At least 1500 deaths took place in London workhouses, asylums, etc., beyond the limits of the county. ↩
12. See Local Government Board Report, C. — 5813. ↩
13. Elizabethan England, pp. 122-3. ↩
14. A domestic servant who had, with incredible perseverance and patience, saved up some £60 or £70, found this little hoard gradually melting away in her struggle to maintain her respectability, and appeared before the Whitechapel Board of Guardians with the balance, asking what she should do. Legally the Board could have given no relief until the amount was dissipated. Ultimately an adequate annuity was privately purchased for her, the extra sum required being found by subscription. ↩
15. So absurd is this legal discouragement of thrift, that a practice is growing up of allowing half of any such pension to benefit the pauper — thus, if he has two shillings a week from his club, the normal relief is reduced only by one shilling. This illegal expedient is connived at by the Local Government Board. ↩
16. See the German Insurance Laws, by the Rev. W. Moore Ede, and the various Foreign Office and American publications on the subject. ↩
17. A Scheme for National Pensions. ↩
18. House of Commons Return, 1881, No. 444. ↩
19. "The Manchester Unity has long desired to establish annuity or super-annuation benefit funds; to commence at sixty-five is recommended, and not less than 5s. per week. The cost of such a benefit has hitherto proved deterrent." (Evidence of Mr. Watson, actuary to Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, before Committee on National Insurance, H.C. 270, 1885, p. 66.) "After two years, only four members had joined the fund." (Evidence of Mr. Holmes, a director, P. 59-) ↩
20. See Dr. Baernreither's English Associations of Working Men; and Report of Committee on National Provident Insurance, H.C. 270 of 1885. ↩
21. Such as the Amalgamated Engineers, Boilermakers, Compositors, etc. ↩
22. This is virtually the proposal made in the Bill of Mr. Alfred Thomas, M.P., repeatedly brought before the House of Commons (1890, No. 49). ↩
23. Since the publication of this proposal in July 1890, the idea of National Pensions for the Aged, not dependent on any scheme of insurance, has secured widespread and influential approval. This has been mainly due to the support given to the project by Mr. Charles Booth, whose paper, read at the Statistical Society in December 1891, attracted universal attention. It has since been republished, with elaborate statistics, as Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age (London, 1892). See also Pensions and Pauperism., by the Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson (London, 1892), and the significant Minority Report by Mr. Henry Broadhurst, M. P., in Report of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor (C. — 7604), 1895, p. xcix. Bills for granting pensions to all aged persons have been introduced by the responsible Ministries of various Australian colonies, and in New Zealand such a measure was in 1897-9S passed by the Lower House of the Legislature, but rejected by the Upper House. ↩
24. This is already the practice in about a third of the Unions in England and Wales. Moreover, children of outdoor paupers are everywhere required to attend school regularly. ↩
25. Report of Local Government Board, C. — 5526, pp. 95-97. ↩
26. During the whole five years' existence of the County Scholarship Scheme of the Technical Education Board of the London County Council, no boy or girl from a Poor Law School has gained any of its 3000 scholarships. ↩
27. Report of House of Lords' Committee on Poor Law Relief, II. L. 363, 1888, p. viii. ↩
28. It is a standing disgrace to the statistical department of the Local Government Board that this lack is (1898) still unsupplied. ↩
29. Facts for Londoners, p. 53. ↩
30. Sec Sir F. M. Eden's State 0f the Poor, and Sir G. Nicholl's History of the English Poor Law. ↩
31. Local Government Board Report, C. — 8583 of 1897. ↩
32. These proposals were in substance adopted by the Government in 1894, so far as England and Wales were concerned, and embodied in the Local Government Act of that year. ↩
33. Report of Poor Law Conference, London, 1889. ↩