Florence Nightingale

“ If we could suppose for a moment by way of hypothesis that the State could, by seizing and educating the 100,000 homeless children running about the streets of London (even though the education should be free) , enable all these to earn their own maintenance honestly and well, without ever coming back as paupers or as thieves upon the rates and the country, even political economy would say, 'Well done'—even those who seem to think that unlimited liberty of the Briton must include that of stealing or of starving or of pauperising his family. ”

“ And all learnt, but a residuum of pure paupers. These will always require to be taught how to feed themselves.
When a government delivers up its own responsibility into the charge of its subordinates who are permanent, it pays a staff to prevent human progress.
The best work the world has seen has been paid work. But for any one of us to deliver up his or her charity, his or her personal responsibility as to every imbecile old woman, as to every dirty child, into the hands of a paid staff, into the hands of any staff indeed, paid or unpaid, is to salve over the sore which we ought to heal. ”

“ As long as a man is liable to be deprived of his right to labour where and when and how he likes, he cannot be called a free man; our political liberties are a farce; and you have a machinery at hand for filling your workhouses.
Is it really possible to believe that our legislators could not, if they gave their minds to it, frame an Act by which the workman might make his own bargain as to wages with his employer, with an appeal to courts of justice or other authorities? ”

“ There is a wicked element here, and this is:—that, whenever emigration of the surplus population—the population which the land, according to the law of Elizabeth, did find work for, and can no longer find work for, and which now overflows into the large towns—by a rush of blood as it were to the head—whenever, we say, emigration on any large scale has been proposed, the answer has been: No, we can't afford to part with our surplus population, because then we shall not be able to undersell every other country by having more hands than we can employ at all times. ”

“ It is a fact that our trades' unions have increased the evil by interfering with the free course of the labour market, and have thereby driven away work to other countries.
It is a fact that the present amount of pauperism exists, notwithstanding free trade, trades' unions to raise the value of labour, poor law tests to compel people to find labour where there is little to be had, out-door relief to supplement low wages, and an unprecedented amount of private charity or almsgiving. ”

“ But, instead of this, we say to those who can't find work, 'Go into the workhouse.' If indeed it were what its name implies, a house for work, an 'Adult Industrial Home,' there would be some sense in it.
But our national common sense has not yet arrived at this result: take out all the sick, infirm, those who have lost either for a time or for life all producing power, cure them or make them as comfortable as you can. ”

“ So far as concerns the able-bodied and non-criminal poor, the real function of a Poor Law is neither to punish nor to feed, but to train them to self-dependence and industry, a branch of national education, which is in small sense helped by reading, writing and figures, or by any 'conscience clause' which can be framed.
There must be of course the natural premium of work, viz. pay, subject, of course, to the natural rise and fall of prices in the labour market. ”

“ Do the ratepayers ever think that the seven millions of annual poor rate would in one single year place every recipient of Poor Law relief, old and young, man, woman and child, on the shores of America?—would pay all expenses, and leave them one or two pounds their pockets to begin the world with? ”

“ But the fact ought to make us all think whether we cannot carry our rates and our charity to a better market than we have been in the habit of doing—to think, not that the remedy is to be sought in this exact way, but whether the annual rate is not to a large extent equivalent to an annual capital, which, once spent, would extinguish the rate altogether. ”

“ Is it not time that some attempt should be made to systematise and economise the rates and multifarious agencies, and almost imperial revenues with which private charity has failed to reach the evil?—nay, has increased it?
Legislation cannot do all. But it can do much of itself, and perhaps more by recognising and giving a proper direction to the never failing streams of private charity which at present end in a marsh.
The evils are as sorrowful as they are great. The evils no one denies. ”

“ It is a fact that all this exists, notwithstanding an annual voluntary emigration.
It is a fact that, within the Queen's dominions, there are entire Europes waiting for settlement and ready to repay labour with such interest as no part of the old world can yield.
It is a fact that a very large proportion of our foreign commerce is made up of trade with the very people who, if they had never left England, would probably long ere this have converted it into a desert. A great many of our present population live by those who have formed a home beyond the seas. ”

“ Now no one can ever really have seen much among the poor, especially in workhouses, without seeing that the faculty of finding work is quite a peculiar one, or the result of education.
The great mass of workmen are perfectly incapable, if work fails them, of forming any reasonable scheme for going to find it elsewhere or in other wise; and starvation will not teach geography. ”

“ Surely this matter of bringing the many lands in our colonies into direct relation with the multitude of strong arms, forcibly idle at home, must be one function of any good government administering a group of islands such as ours, while the population expands itself in so great a ratio, while there is no power of expansion in the soil. ”

“ Now, as above said, the wages of a nation ought to cover the maintenance both of the producers and of the sick and infirm depending upon them.
Without falling in the least into the error of the French or Spanish 'Ateliers Nationaux,' surely it is possible for a Poor Law to help its poor to find work—where work is in one place and labour in another, to bring them together. ”

“ Political economy requires farther expansion in order to include all the elements of this great social problem.
It is a true doctrine that demand and supply regulate the price of all things, labour included. ”

“ As long as the legislature can find no legislative remedy against the tyranny of trades' unions, who decree work to be judged by quantity, not quality, who decree that superior quality of work shall not be paid for—the first element of freedom is wanting. ”

“ The 'workhouse test' has saddled this country with pauperism, more perhaps than anything except the want of education—education not into the mystery of letters and figures, but of work. Consider the amount of real practical workable knowledge shown by the trades' unions in the answers given a winter or two ago, by the shipwrights, to the offer of employment on two ships. These men, knowing that ship-building is an irregular, a fluctuating employment, pitch their expenditure at the maximum rate of their wages ”

“ The law hence levies a tax on the whole community, whether employers of labour or not, for the purpose of supplementing the want of wages, want of foresight, or want of self-control, as the case may be.
It has now to be considered how the evil can be met.
Beginning with the political economy of the question: in all trade and great mercantile and manufacturing enterprise there is an element of uncertainty, an irregular element not existing to the same degree in land and agricultural enterprise. ”

“ There is good sense as well as good political economy in this, only the work should not be made a 'test.' It should be made to pay.
And surely oakum-picking is not the most profitable occupation to which women can be put.
Is there not needle-work?
It is true that needlework, although peculiarly fitted for women, must be taught. If the vast majority at present of needlewomen are not well paid, it is because their work is not worth the money. Those who can work well can command their own terms. ”

“ When Christ says, 'The poor ye have always with you,' he cannot have meant that we were 'always' to be giving them money, but that we were 'always' to be 'doing good' to them. Now the only real 'good' is done by helping those to work who could not do it without our help. ”

“ The State, in one department, does give work, but it is unproductive work. Unproductive work seems as great a blunder as trades' unions ever made.
It is always cheaper to pay labour its full value. Labour underpaid is more expensive. ”

“ Supposing it were a more usual thing for younger sons to take their portion of the hereditary wealth and also the overflowing population of their fathers' estates to the colonies, as was formerly the case with the Spanish noble families who set out with some of each trade; in place of one America, we should have twenty Englands. And what an outlet for our produce! Here in England, unemployed poor are a negative quantity. They eat up what we raise. ”

“ There are times when there is a great deal too much to do, and times when there is a great deal too little; in other words, times when there is too much labour for the market, and times when there is not enough. ”

“ Paul's opinion, that a man must work to eat, is so clear that one would think it was also clear, for people who read the New Testament, that not giving money but helping men to work, to exercise their producing power, who have not the gift, natural or acquired, to do so unaided, is the charity which, above all, is preached there. ”

“ One would think a very obvious permanent arrangement in such a country as England, with such a limitless extent of colonial lands, would be to prepare areas for colonisation—to put up, at a cost to be repaid by the colonists, some kind of shelter—to select the colonists—and to brigade them and send them out to the land, seeing we cannot bring the land to them. ”

“ Who have risen up to do the real Poor Law work? Müller at Bristol, the Roman Catholic 'Little Sisters of the Poor,' both societies of foreigners, and doing their voluntary part of Poor Law work with more Christianity and more economy than the guardians themselves. ”

“ Day by day, and year by year, all kinds of reports of associations and advertisements in newspapers indicate that we cannot go on as we are, and that the whole subject of the unemployed poor, in other words, of the working faculty without the will or means of applying it productively, must be taken up by a special commission or committee which will go into the whole question without prejudice, and tell us what is to be done. ”

“ Labour should be made to pay better than thieving. At present, it pays worse. To gaol governors it is well known that certain 'excellent' prisoners, very good artisans who work well at their trade in prison, will leave it as soon as they are out, because they have a better trade 'to look to,' viz. ”

“ It is above all however towards devising new industrial occupations that our ingenuity might be directed—e.g. Lord Shaftesbury's Ragged Shoeblack Brigade: there a want, viz. to have one's shoes cleaned away from home, was supplied—or in filling new fields of industry which we have not to create, for God has created them for us somewhere or other in the boundless empire on which the sun never sets. ”

“ The works for which adult paupers, under supervision and with the natural stimulus of pay, are fit, are numerous. But there are two for which they are unfit, attending to sick and attending to children. All grown-up paupers are paupers from defect—moral defect, intellectual defect, physical defect. It has been found by actual experiment that no training can make these grown-up ones such as we ought to put about sick or children. ”

“ The object is: to teach a man that it is dearer to steal than to work. Hitherto the object of our laws seems to have been to teach that it is dearer to work than to steal, and not only this, but that it is dearer to work than to beg. ”

“ But in England, we don't colonise—we only emigrate. And people left to themselves to learn how to emigrate successfully often die in the process. In the Roman sense of colonisation, or even in the French sense, we do nothing. ”

“ Consider the always recurring distress of every winter; e.g. that of the East End. It is no longer possible to shut our eyes to the facts. Free trade, from which so much was expected, although it may have provided for many willing workers, has left a vast number without work. ”

“ The industrious widow left with children, for instance, cannot go out to find work, and if work comes to her, it is a welcome accident.
A man may certainly go out to find work, but whether he gets it or not depends exclusively upon his previous training in the habit of obtaining work. ”

“ In the report of the Poor Law Commissioners for 1837 it is stated that not only was emigration encouraged but that 'the over-stocked labour market' in one county had been 'relieved of 2,000' profitless mouths sent to the manufacturing districts 'at a cost of 3,600l.' with the practical result of lowering their cost to the rates from 2,000l. ”