William Amias Bailward

“ By the admission of everybody casual labour is one of the most crying evils of the day, and we meet it by establishing centres of casual labour all over the country. What is worst of all, perhaps, is that we are fast losing the power of taking stock of our position, because we bury public relief in the statistics of various branches of public administration and disguise it as education, public health, or the reward of industry. ”

“ The first thing that is plain is that it is a policy of despair—of despair, on the one hand, of human nature, of despair, on the other, that the industrial classes can ever live by their labour. There are many who believe that this despair is not justified in either case, and who believe even more strongly that if we accept things as inevitable we make them inevitable. We may ask, moreover, why if human nature is so poor a thing we should entrust our destinies blindfold to human beings who come to the front in the vicissitudes of party politics and who may perhaps be no better than ourselves. ”

“ That charity is not much recognised, certainly not advertised at all, but it is the charity which is felt. It is the sort of charity which takes trouble—which helps lame dogs over stiles, which goes out of its own way to lead blind men over crossings—a thing we may see done almost any day in the streets of London. It may have no money to give, but it does not spare either personal sympathy or personal effort. It begins at home because it believes that its first duty is to itself, the duty, namely, of self-respect. What it considers essential for itself it tries to promote in others. ”

“ The leading feature of State relief as compared with charitable relief is that it is compulsorily levied. Next to this come its centralisation, its indefinite ownership, its indefinite limits. Owing to its centralisation it has the same sort of attraction for the very poor and those whose lives are spent in shadow as a lighthouse has for birds, moths, and other winged things which are drawn to it and beat themselves to death against the glass. The poor get to measure their lives by it from the cradle to the grave. ”

“ Many people who are both vicious and criminal are not paupers. The first step in pauperism is to the average man analogous to the loss of virtue in a woman. He is never quite the same again. Though there are some who have the strength of will to resist its further stages, yet to the many it means the gradual mildew of the spirit, the blunting of energy both physical and moral, and the loss of responsibility and self-control. It is an insidious thing, and attacks human nature on its weakest side, the side of its indolence, and the danger is common to rich and poor. ”

“ The ethics of party politics are not encouraging. Or if we turn to the prospects of creating universal prosperity by Act of Parliament, we may ask what assurance we have that this is an ideal capable of attainment. All that we know so far is that the legislation of the last twenty-five years which has been directed to this end has brought us no nearer our goal. One measure of relief has succeeded another, yet the cry of poverty is louder than ever, and there is constant asseveration that the "rich are growing richer and the poor growing poorer." ”

“ With the weakening or annihilation of self-respect and the principle of self-maintenance the evils which we seek to abolish grow in intensity; no relief can supply the gap which is created by the weakening of character. Most of us probably know many concrete cases of people who have been ruined by "charity "and the Poor Law between them. We see them in the streets every day. Self-respect is a sensitive thing, not difficult to unbalance, especially if we are taught, as we often are, that we can depend upon others, and yet, by some juggling of language, retain our independence. ”

“ Poverty is a natural appetite merely wanting food, pauperism a ravenous atrophy which no food can satisfy. Poverty strives to cure itself, pauperism to contaminate others. Poverty often stimulates to exertion, pauperism always paralyses. Poverty is sincere, pauperism an arch-hypocrite. Poverty has naturally a proud spirit, pauperism a base one—now servile, now insolent. Poverty is silent and retiring, pauperism clamorous and imposing: the one grateful, the other the reverse. There is much that is alluring in poverty, but pauperism is altogether hateful. ”

“ In the first place, voluntary charity has this to commend it—that it is contributed by those who can best afford it, and that in most cases, at all events, its motive force is sympathy and goodwill. State relief, on the other hand, is enforced by the blunt methods of the broker's man, and is often exacted from people who are poor themselves, and the fact of compulsion robs it of its virtue. We know that the quality of mercy is not strained, and we are told that it drops "like the gentle dew from heaven." ”

“ The second great function of the Elizabethan Poor Law was the relief of the impotent, and under it practically every poor person had an old age pension. Those who have studied the old parish books will tell you that in most parts of England almost the whole labouring population—young, middle-aged, and old—were upon the rates, and outdoor relief was universal. There is no difference, but in name, between old age pensions and outdoor relief, except that old age pensions are more attractive, because they are on a higher scale and are free from the name of pauperism. ”

“ And even to-day no Guardian or worker amongst the poor can fail to know how constantly, when the parish pension comes in at the door, the allowance from relative or friend flies out at the window, and how ceaseless is the struggle to throw off natural responsibilities and duties upon the rates.
We have, then, to make up our minds upon which principle we shall rely for the remedial relief of poverty, subject always to the condition, upon which all are agreed, that the necessaries of life must be provided for everyone who is in need of them, without regard to the causes of that need. ”

“ But the effect of State relief upon the charity of the public is as dust in the balance compared with that which it has in displacing another kind of charity, which is far more widely diffused and all-pervading. I refer to that natural and unseen charity which is the cement of society, which has no place in advertisement or subscription lists, and which has been well compared to "hidden springs, the existence of which is only divined by the greenness of the turf overhead." ”

“ It cannot be denied that Socialism of this kind has made great advances of late years; not that, in my opinion, it is itself any nearer realisation, but that it has acted with constantly increasing momentum in the promotion of another form of Socialism to which I shall presently refer. In the future it can, I think, never be more than a dream. In the past it has never been more than a theory: there is no instance in history in which society has organised itself upon such principles ”

“ Meanwhile those who are responsible for these practices are frequently the very men who appear before the public at election time as the most ardent advocates of humanity, the foremost champions of the cause of the poor.
It cannot be a matter for wonder that the electorate, who over a succession of years have watched the sequence of promise and performance, should regard the situation with something more akin to dislike than indifference, and should abstain from taking any part in electing those whom they have learned to distrust. ”

“ The most important, though the least recognised, is that which has been designated as "natural" charity—the charity, that is to say, of those who know and respect one another. But imagined possibilities of State relief are directly antagonistic to that charity, as we have already seen. We shall be told that it is hard to ask children to support their parents; the real question is whether they should support their own parents or some one else's parents. We shall be told that the rich ought to be made to support the poor. ”

“ These schemes uniformly failed, and the author of "Robinson Crusoe" pointed out, as far back as 1704, that if the State gives work to one man it takes it away from another, and that the effect of such employment is merely " to transpose our manufactures and confound our trade; for every skein of worsted spun in a workhouse there must be a skein the less spun by some poor family who spun it before; to set poor people to work upon the same thing that other poor people are employed upon is giving to one what you take away from another, putting a vagabond in the honest man's employment." ”

“ We have been told that we shall always have the poor with us, but we have never been told that one class is to be doomed to eternal poverty. But that is what must happen if the poor resign themselves to poverty, and are satisfied to be "kept" by the State. We want, like Queen Elizabeth, to recover people from poverty and to give free play to those forces which are at work in an upward direction. ”

“ If metropolitan workhouses are not to be swamped with those who have been and are still leading dissipated and disreputable lives, greater stringency will have to be adopted in respect to them, both as a matter of public policy and in fairness to the more decent inmates. A fair percentage at least of those who frequent our workhouses need not be there at all if they behaved themselves even moderately well outside. We must all of us know cases, for instance, in which children would have kept their parents away from the workhouse altogether but for their intolerable and continued misbehaviour. ”

“ Of course Poor Law administrators have nothing to do with all this except to remember that their expenditure is only part of a much wider question. The modern idea of the State as an omnipotent charitable agency is quite at variance with that which the older generation were taught and believed in. The matter is one so vital not to the poor alone but to the whole country, of which the daily wage-earners are the basis and foundation, that it affects, possibly more than any other question foreign or domestic, the future of the nation. ”

“ The bulk of humanity believes, and will continue to believe, that they must make the best use that they can of their reason, even if it be fallible. They may be swayed to and fro by gusts of feeling that blow this way and that, but they are not in the least likely to surrender their ultimate right of judgment. They will probably continue to believe that no progress can be real and lasting which does not, like freedom, "broaden down from precedent to precedent." ”

“ The melancholy part of it all is that we never arrive at any settled policy. The Legislature has ordained in its wisdom that the administration of the Poor Law—perhaps the most difficult administration that there is—shall be entrusted to any one who chooses to come forward at election time, and we all know how difficult it is to get qualified people to offer themselves. ”

“ The essence of charity is personal feeling, and it implies much more than the mere gift. But how can we say this of public relief? So far as the poor are concerned they learn to look upon it as a right, the withholding of which is an injury. "Why don't some one make 'em act honest?" said an old lady outside a certain Board Room not long ago after she had been refused outdoor relief. So far as the administrators are concerned, what real personal feeling can there be between a Board of Guardians and a host of recipients of relief most of whom are personally unknown to them? ”