Beatrice Webb

“ It is vital that the Local Education Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure, quite irrespective of the family's destitution, whatever Parliament may prescribe as the National Minimum of nurture and training for all children, the neglect of which will otherwise bring these children, when they grow up, themselves to a state of destitution. It is becoming no less clear that some Authority—we say a National Authority—must register and deal with the man who is unemployed, long before extended unemployment has demoralised him and reduced his family to destitution. ”

“ The policy of the Central Authority at this date, in short, deliberately excluded any use of the workhouse for the curative, reformatory, or educational treatment of any class whatsoever. There was only to be one institution in each Union for all classes of paupers. It was to be a place which, whilst it provided the full requirements of physical health, starved both the will and the intelligence, and forced the pauper into a condition of blank-mindedness. ”

“ Now, it becomes more and more apparent that it is a useless extravagance to adopt the policy of curative and restorative treatment, unless we are prepared to "search out" the cases [288] that need dealing with,—the infants and children who are just beginning to be neglected by their parents and guardians, the persons of all ages who are just beginning to suffer from disease, the feeble-minded lacking ameliorating care, the man just smitten with unemployment—at the stage in their complaint at which the application of our treatment has, at any rate, some chance of yielding effective results. ”

“ To enforce these obligations—all new since 1834—upon the individual citizen, experience shows that some other pressure on his volition is required than merely leaving him alone. Hence the community, by the combination of the principles of Curative Treatment, Universal Provision and Compulsion, deliberately 'weights the alternatives,' in the guise of a series of experiments upon volition. The individual retains as much freedom of choice as—if not more than—he ever enjoyed before. ”

“ Finally, in the case of able-bodied and able-minded men and women in health, whose distress arises merely from their being without wage-earning employment—whatever may be the cause of such unemployment—it will, we think, be wholly impracticable to obtain, for a Destitution Authority, any powers of compulsory segregation. To compel, by law, able-bodied men and women to become paupers against their will; to force upon them a degrading status with the stigma of pauperism, when they do not even apply for public assistance ”

“ We may, on the one hand, ask Parliament to arrest the ever-increasing activities of the Local Health Authorities, stop the provision of more isolation hospitals, check the Health Visitors and the crusade against infantile mortality, rescind the recent order of the Local Government Board annexing to their sphere the whole range of tuberculosis, and remit all the sick poor once more to the Parish Council and its Poorhouse. We may propose to repeal the Unemployed Workmen Act and the Old Age Pensions Act, and thrust back the unemployed workmen and the aged into the Poor Law. ”

“ This policy of "less eligibility," into which any Poor Law Authority is only too apt to be driven in dealing with the able-bodied, seems to us so futile and so barbarous in its inhumanity, and leads to such demoralising forms of parasitism on the labour of women and children, on begging and vagrancy, and even on a career of crime, that we should regard its introduction into Scotland, by the new Public Assistance Authorities that our colleagues propose, as nothing less than a national disaster. ”

“ The only effective substitute for deterrence is, the Minority Commissioners suggest, the Principle of Prevention—prevention, that is, not merely of pauperism, but of the very occurrence of destitution. This negatives the very idea of a Destitution Authority, whatsoever its designation or its policy. It is in vain to hope that any Poor Law, or any Destitution Authority, however improved, can ever prevent or even diminish destitution ”

“ If it can be said that it is to some defect of moral character or personal shortcoming that the sinking into destitution at the bottom of the road is, in a final analysis, more correctly to be ascribed—though on this point which among us is qualified to be a judge?—it is abundantly clear that the assumed defect or shortcoming manifests itself in, or at least is accompanied by, either child-neglect, sickness, feeble-mindedness, or unemployment. These are the roads by which the future pauper travels. ”

“ If power is to be given to any Authority to separate a child from its parents, and to deprive the latter of its custody and care, public opinion emphatically demands that this power should be conferred and exercised solely for the good of the child, and with a view to its best possible nurture and training. ”

“ The universal maintenance of a definite minimum of civilised life—seem to be in the interest of the community no less than in that of the individual—becomes the joint responsibility of an indissoluble partnership. The community recognises a duty in the curative treatment of all who are in need of it—a duty most clearly seen in the medical treatment of the sick and the education of the children. ”

“ We do not see that the nature of lunacy or feeble-mindedness differs in the three Kingdoms to such an extent as to warrant three different policies in its treatment. We think that the first mind of our colleagues was the best. We, like the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, see no reason why lunatics should be treated as paupers any more than as criminals. We certainly see no reason why Scottish lunatics and feeble-minded should remain paupers, when English lunatics and feeble-minded are to be relieved from this stigma. ”

“ Charles Buller, the first President of the Poor Law Board, adumbrated in the guise of a policy what were really two distinct and inherently incompatible lines of action. The Central Authority, on the one hand, pressed on boards of guardians the advisability of discriminating between the honest unemployed in search of work and the professional tramp—"the thief, the mendicant and the prostitute, who crowd the vagrant wards"—even to the extent of refusing all relief whatsoever to able-bodied men of the latter class, who were not in immediate danger of starvation. ”

“ What is more important is that it does not seem at all probable that any House of Commons would consent to give to any Destitution Authority, maintaining the stigma of pauperism, the power to make a man a pauper against his will. ”

“ Today we see the Central Authority making use of the Principle of Compulsion as part of its policy towards every class, except the deserving healthy aged. The wayfarer, whatever his character or conduct, is to be compulsorily detained, under penal conditions, for twenty-four hours, or, in certain cases, much longer, in order to deter him from ever again applying for a night's lodging. The able-bodied man or woman in the workhouse is, under certain circumstances, to be compulsorily detained, for a day, or even a week, in order to deter him or her from passing too frequently "in and out." ”

“ We proceed now to consider the last section of all, the adult able-bodied man or woman without means, who becomes destitute through not being in employment at wages. We think that it is invidious and unwarranted to assume that such unemployment is, in any particular case, wholly or even mainly the result of any "defect of the citizen character." We have been unable to resist the evidence that unemployment, and even acute distress from unemployment, comes, as a matter of fact, to workmen of excellent skill and character. ”

“ If, in one service or another, the Principle of Universal Provision is adopted, it is because we have become convinced, with regard to that service, that Universal Provision, either gratuitously or at a charge, is actually less expensive than any alternative; or that it is of such great importance to the community to "maximise the consumption" that it may be looked upon as really preventing some more costly evil. Throughout the whole field we find this Principle of Prevention at once limiting the real cost to the community, and justifying the outlay. ”

“ A single English workhouse contains more that justly calls for condemnation in the principle on which it is established than is found in the very worst prisons or public lunatic asylums that I have seen. The workhouse as now organised is a reproach and disgrace peculiar to England; nothing corresponding to it is found throughout the whole continent of Europe. In France the medical patients of our workhouses would be found in 'hopitaux'; the infirm aged poor would be in hospices ”

“ There is no class for the lying-in cases. There is no class for the lunatics, idiots, or imbeciles. There is no provision for infants at the breast, who, by the classificatory scheme, were ordered to be separated from their mothers. There was no class for the vagrant intending to stay only one night. Finally, there was no provision made for any segregation by character—not merely none by past character, but not even for any by present character or conduct, which would have effected a separation between quiet and orderly inmates and the turbulent prostitute or semi-criminal. ”

“ We now see that the condition of the lowest grade of independent labourer—whether he is chronically "under-employed" like the whole class of dock and other casual labourers, or "sweated" like the home-working chair-maker or slipper-maker—is so deplorably below the level of adequate subsistence that to make the lot of the pauper "less eligible" means to reduce him below any acceptable standard of civilised existence. ”

“ It is at once equally shocking to every principle of reason and every feeling of humanity, that all these varied forms of wretchedness should be thus crowded together into one common abode, that no attempt should be made by law to classify them, and to provide appropriate places for the relief of each. ”

“ Quite irrespective of "Poor Law principles," the case for institutional rather than domiciliary treatment of nearly every sick case became, to the medical experts who now advised the Central Authority, simply overwhelming. "The treatment which in sickness the poor receive in workhouses constitutes," said the Central Authority in 1878, "one of the most valuable forms of medical relief. With a considerable portion of the population, indeed, it is the only mode in which, when overtaken by sickness, their medical needs can be adequately met." ”

“ There is, in fact, to-day, a sort of "No Man's Land" in Poor Law administration, in which the principles of 1834 have been de facto abandoned, without the principles of 1907 being consciously substituted. Owing to this lack of central direction, we find diversity without deliberation, indulgence without cure, and relief without discipline. ”

“ The case of the infant or child suffering from neglect is another patent example. In short, if the Public Authority must in all cases hold its hand until destitution has set in, as any Destitution Authority must do, it might as well abandon all hope, in the vast majority of cases, of any effective curative or restorative treatment. It never gets the cases until they are too far gone. We might as well run a hospital on the plan of never consenting to admit any case until mortification had set in! ”

“ Everywhere there is a duplication of authorities, and more or less overlapping of work. We are spending out of the rates and taxes, in one way or another, directly on sickness and Public Health, a vast sum of money annually—no man knows how much, but it certainly amounts to six or seven millions sterling. Meanwhile, as is now being revealed to us, a vast amount of sickness goes altogether untreated, with the result of grave damage to our population, and unnecessary loss of productive capacity to the community as a whole. ”

“ If, however, we had an Unemployment Authority responsible for either finding a man a job or placing him in training, we could for the first time strictly enforce on every man and woman who were, as a matter of fact, failing to maintain themselves and their dependants, the obligation to make use of this organ of the State. When the visitor from the Children's Care Committee discovered an underfed child, or the Health Visitor discovered a woman about to be confined without proper nursing and medical attendance, it would be no use for the man to say he was out of work. ”

“ Whatever their sex, their age, their health, their character, or their conduct, these "Ins and Outs" come at the crisis of their destitution, and go as soon as they can see their way to some sort of a living outside, choosing their own times and seasons for demanding the maintenance which a Poor Law Authority dare not withhold, and for resuming the liberty which it cannot refuse. ”