Poor Law

“ To write an essay on the law and the poor in relation to the relief of distress would be to traverse the whole ground of this famous report, but for my own part I only want to call attention to an institution typical of all the faults and errors of the Poor Law—the workhouse.
For if the rich have by their laws made a mess of the alehouse, what about the other public-house—the workhouse? When you have no money to enable you to take your ease at your inn the only other hostelry open for you and your wife and children is the Poor House. ”

“ It implies, I think, the abolition of Boards of Guardians and of all the special machinery for relief. It implies, perhaps, the abolition of the Poor Law itself. There is no class of “the poor” as there is a class of criminals. Poverty is not a crime, and there are poor among the most honourable of the people. Poverty is a loose and wide term, involving the greater number of the people. There must, therefore, be some loss of self-respect in those of the poor who feel themselves set apart for special treatment. ”

“ It was urged that the operation of the legalized poor law relief could only create new pauperism wherever its unwholesome touch was felt. It would impress on the well-inclined and the industrious the futility of honest and persevering endeavor, inasmuch as idleness could get itself better cared for than laborious poverty. Idleness and immorality, it was argued, were well housed and fed, while honest independence and virtue were left outside in cold and hunger. ”

“ They entirely ignore the whole question of pauperisation by the Poor Law, of which we have had, and still have, such bitter experience in this country—a question which appears to most Poor Law administrators to be of vital importance. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they profess to be able to cure pauperism by making everyone a pauper. ”

“ Underneath the feet of the whole wage-earning class is the abyss of the Poor Law. I see before me a respectable family applying for relief. What do we do to them? We, the Government of England, break up the family. ”

“ Difficult, almost impossible, as such discrimination between deserving and undeserving is, it is felt that any genuine reform of our present poor law system demands that some attempt in this direction should be made. ”

“ There is some reason for these laws, as long as the poor-laws are duly executed; as long as the poor are duly relieved, according to law; but, unless the poor-laws exist; unless they be in full force; unless they be duly executed; unless efficient and prompt relief be given to necessitous persons, these acts, and many others approaching to a similar description, are acts of barefaced and most abominable tyranny. ”

“ As I grope my way back along the main road of the history of the law into the dark ages I seem to find the milestones of reform set at longer and longer intervals. This puts me in good heart for the happy youths whose lot it will be to set their faces towards the morning breezes of the future. Their milestones will come at shorter intervals every day, until the burden of the law drops from the shoulders of the poor at the wicket gate.
There is no greater folly than to sing the praises of the good old days. Anyhow, the law had no good old days for the poor. ”

“ The poor, whom at such vast cost and with such parade of machinery it relieves, are often demoralized. There is neither worth nor joy to be got out of the pauper, who has learned to measure success in life by skill in evading inquiry. 168And, what is most striking of all, the Poor Law has allowed a mass of poverty to accumulate which has led to the erection of charity upon charity, and is still, by its squalor, its misery and hopelessness, a disgrace and a danger to the nation. ”

“ No doubt, however, its good effects will be but slowly perceived, and I fear there is much disappointment in store for the millions of poor labourers, who expect to have abundance of food and clothing the moment the Bill becomes a law. Poor creatures, their state is most deplorable and haunts me day and night. The very best of Poor Laws must be quite insufficient. Indeed, wherever there is a necessity for a Poor Law at all there must be something wrong, I think; for if each proprietor, farmer and clergyman did his duty there would be no misery, and if they do not, no Poor Law can prevent it. ”

“ Who are the poor? The "poor law," on the one hand, assigns a meaning too narrow for our purpose, confining the application of the name to "the destitute," who alone are recognized as fit subjects of legal relief. The common speech of the comfortable classes, on the other hand, not infrequently includes the whole of the wage-earning class under the title of "the poor." As it is our purpose to deal with the pressure of poverty as a painful social disease, it is evident that the latter meaning is unduly wide. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Job, great, good, patient soul that he was, had his sour moments—a medical friend of mine believes that he had a liver,—I am sorry not to take the patriarch’s advice, but I do not see my way to hold my peace about the law and the poor, and that is why I propose to try and point out how and why the law as a system is hard on the poor, and wherein the governors and great ones of the earth may further temper the wind to the shorn lamb. ”

“ We would destroy or alter nothing in the Poor Law, or its administration, which is good and serviceable, but would amend it in those points in which it is working mischief to the labouring classes and loss and injury to the community. ”

“ The poor can understand criminal law, and its justice and its necessity easily enough, and respect its severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law; and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. ”

“ Grant that the poor-laws are just; grant that every necessitous creature has a right to demand relief from some parish or other; grant that the law has most effectually provided that every man shall be protected against the effects of hunger and of cold; grant these, and then the law which compels the man without house or land to take up arms and risk his life in defence of the country, is a perfectly just law ”

“ In their case, it is clear, their retention in the class "pauper," and their relegation to the Poor Law Authority, is advocated, not for their own good. They are, it is suggested, to be accorded a treatment other than that which the State would otherwise afford to them—that is to say, they are to suffer the stigma of pauperism—merely in order "by expectation and example" to [354] deter other persons from taking advantage in their old age of the maintenance which the State affords. ”

“ Are the poor never wronged in the quality they receive? Is there honesty in the bread you eat, in a single necessity which clothes or feeds or warms you? Let those whom the law protects consider it a protector: when did it ever protect me? When did it ever protect the poor man? The government of a State, the institutions of law, profess to provide for all those who 'obey.' Mark! a man hungers,— do you feed him? ”

“ And, short of entire removal out of the Poor Law (as has actually been done with the [263] able-bodied who are "unemployed," the children in industrial schools, and the patients of the Public Health Department) , everything possible has been done to remove the "stigma of pauperism" from the children in Poor Law institutions and from the recipients of medical relief. ”

“ Yet if there was a problem called the reform of the Poor Law in 1905 worthy of the consideration of the good men and women who gave up a large slice of their lives to working at it surely in 1914 there is still such a problem, and some of it is at least as urgent as the questions over which our political pastors wrangle and fight with such splendid energy. ”

“ I should like to interest the man in the street about legal reform and to see him at work remedying some of the more obvious of the existing abuses I have referred to, but I am under no delusion that such reforms would bring about the millennium. It is good to do the pressing work in the vineyards on the slopes of the mountain, but it is permissible for poor human man to have his day off now and then to climb on the hilltops and gaze out on the limitless ocean of the future and indulge in wild surmises of the after-world. ”

“ To sum the matter up:—In following the development of Poor Law legislation, we watch society struggling to free itself from the fetters of a primitive communism of poverty and subjection, a state of things possessing many 'plausible advantages.' Legislation for the management of the Poor often impeded, and only occasionally expedited, this beneficent process.... ”

“ Hence the famous principle of the English Poor Law reform of 1834—that the condition of the able-bodied pauper should always be less eligible than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer—has never been adopted by the administrators of the Scottish Poor Law. ”

“ In the first place, there has been reform of the poor laws. So corrupt had this system become, that a distinct caste had well nigh sprung into permanent existence, families having been known to subsist in idleness for five generations solely by means of skilful appropriation of public and private charities.
The law giving to paupers the preference in all cases where any public work was to be done, operated badly. Good workmen might starve for want of work: by declaring themselves paupers they obtained employment. ”

“ I have dwelt on this subject at some length because in most of the chapters of this book my complaint has been that the laws are insufficient to help the poor, because they have in past days been enacted by the rich, and are still being administered by the rich, without knowledge of, and sympathy for, the best interests of the poor. ”

“ Poor Law, the Policy of the Central Authority has undergone great changes. What these changes have actually been, and at what dates and in what order they occurred, the following chronological analysis of the action of the Poor Law Commissioners, the Poor Law Board, and the Local Government Board for England and Wales attempts to set forth. ”

“ Hostile as they are unjustly accused of being to the principle of legal relief, they are the first who fully proved the compatibility of any Poor Law, in which a right to relief was recognised, with the permanent interests of the labouring class and of posterity. ”

“ Society is so constructed, its various parts are so connected, the interests of all who compose it are so interwoven, the rich are so dependent on the labour of the poor, and the poor upon the wealth of the rich, that any attempt to legislate partially, or with a view to the good of a portion only, without a due regard to the whole of the community, must prove in the end fallacious, fatal to its object, and injurious in general to a ruinous degree. ”

“ Now there is a great deal that might be done to make the law less harsh to the poor without any very elaborate legislation, and certainly without any of those absurd inquiries and commissions which are the stones the latter-day lawgivers throw at the poor when they ask for the bread of justice. ”

“ And just in proportion as the Poor Law is strictly administered, and in proportion as entrance into the house is insisted upon as a condition of relief, so, on the whole, is the Poor Law better administered—better administered, I do not hesitate to say, not only in the interest of the poor themselves, but in the interest of the ratepayers at large. ”

“ The most radical objection, and we infer the most deeply felt, against the Supersession of the Poor Law Authority by the various specialised and preventive Authorities that are already at work, seems to be a conviction that, in proposing to treat the problem of destitution as one of Sickness or Mental Defect, of Infirmity or Old Age, of Unemployment or Neglected Childhood, we are ignoring the "moral factor." It is alleged that, among all paupers, notwithstanding the different roads by which they may have come to destitution, there is a certain moral taint ”

“ Why is the poverty of others concealed under this cover of law, so that it should be thought that, if the law permitted, they would have such things as they are not now able to procure? Romans, do you wish to excite among your wives an emulation of this sort, that the rich should wish to have what no other can have; and that the poor, lest they should be despised as such, should extend their expenses beyond their abilities? ”

“ But those who are convinced of its truth, may, with the most anxious desire of extending the comforts and elevating the condition of the lower classes of society, rationally express their apprehensions, that the attempt to sanction by law a right which in the nature of things cannot be adequately gratified, may terminate in disappointment, irritation, and aggravated poverty. ”

“ To break up the Poor Law, and to transfer its several services to the Local Education, Health, Lunacy, and Pension Authorities, and to a national authority for the able-bodied, is to hand over the task of treating curatively the several sections of the destitute to authorities charged with the prevention of the several causes of destitution from which those sections are suffering. ”

“ That is to say, according as he and his ancestors have rested their feet cramped in pinched shoes under the mahogany of the wealthy or tramped barefoot along the highway in the freedom of poverty, so will a judge’s principles of natural justice favour the rich or the poor.
We cannot get away from the fact that our judges make a great deal of law. The idea that a law is somewhere in existence and that the judges merely adopt it will not, I think, hold good for a moment. ”

“ When it became clear that it was intolerably unjust to throw the burden of the largest number of paupers on the poorest ratepayers, poor-law areas were enlarged so as to unite rich and poor neighbourhoods ”