Overseer of the poor

“ It is one of the very first steps that ought to be taken in carrying into execution any plan for forming an Establishment for the Poor; it being as necessary to know the names and places of abode of those, who, by voluntary subscription, or otherwise, assist in relieving the Poor, as to be acquainted with the dwellings of the objects themselves; and this measure is as indispensable necessary when an institution for the Poor is formed in a small country-town or village, as when it is formed in the largest capital. ”

“ Sooner or later the reaction comes, the public purse is exhausted, and poor people are left to face the world robbed of their only real resources, namely, those that lie in themselves. Seventy years ago practically the whole population was in the clutches of the Poor Law. Then came the great struggle of 1834, and practical emancipation. Now we are again upon the top of a reaction. Since 1900 the official figures of pauperism have been steadily on the upgrade, and we have now a huge volume of State relief which is outside the Poor Law altogether. ”

“ And yet we all know that the rates are very heavy, and that the struggling poor are cruelly handicapped to keep the idle, the old, the young, the sick. We have all read of the culpable extravagance and dishonest waste which goes on behind the high walls of the palatial institutions governed by the “guardians,” who should be the guardians of the public purse as well as of the helpless poor. ”

“ What a contrast, indeed, do we exhibit!—What! in such an hour as this, at a moment pregnant with the national fate, when, pressing as the exigency may be, the hard task of squeezing the money from the pockets of an impoverished people, from the toil, the drudgery of the shivering poor, must make the most practised collector's heart ache while he tears it from them—can it be that people of high rank, and professing high principles, that they or their families should seek to thrive on the spoils of misery and fatten on the meals wrested from industrious poverty? ”

“ But the poor, how do they fare? It is necessary to state, with reference to this point, that the peculiar politico-economic theories which have had such frequent expression in the letters, reports, and orders of the Poor-Law Commissioners, have also had their influence upon all persons connected with the administration of relief. ”

“ One of our great judges, Sir Matthew Hale, said, long ago, what we even now too often forget—"The prevention of poverty, idleness, and a loose and disorderly education, even of poor children, would do more good to this kingdom than all the gibbets, and cauterizations, and whipping-posts, and jails in this kingdom." The whole scheme of legislation for the poor was to set the poor to work by forced contributions from capital. If the energy of the people had not found out how to set themselves to work in spite of bad laws, we might have remained a nation of slaves and paupers. ”

“ If they found their means and powers inadequate for their designs, they could lay the case before the town-meeting, when, perhaps, it would occur to the tax-payers that, after all, the cheapest and most efficient overseers of the poor might be found among Christian ladies! ”

“ They, like earlier writers, ascribe the evil directly to demoralisation caused by the Poor Law, and they lay down two fundamental principles as essential to the administration of public relief—the first, that it should be limited to the relief of destitution, such destitution to be tested by the willingness to accept institutional relief; the second, that the position of the pauper should be "less eligible" than that of the poor workman who supports himself, and has to contribute to the rates and taxes. Outside these limits the relief of the poor was to be left to voluntary charity. ”

“ In short, all those who can work yet are supported in idleness by any mistaken charity, or are subsisted by their parishes, which are at this time, through all England overburdened by indolent and lazy poor, who claim and are designed only for impotent poor;—all those who add nothing by their labor to the welfare of the state, are useless, burdensome, or dangerous to it. ”

“ It is within the compass of probability, that there have been, and are yet, instances, wherein the overseers of the poor, and more especially the assistant overseers, who are mere mercenaries, and serve for pay, have been, and are, some of them at least, bribed by the owners of mills for spinning silk, cotton or woollen yarn, to visit the habitation of the persons receiving parochial aid, and to compel them, when children are wanting, utterly regardless of education, health, or inclination, to deliver up their offspring, or by cutting off the parish allowance leave them to perish for want! ”

“ Finally, we would again repeat that our pauperism is due to our poverty, that our policy is based on the claims recognised by statute as the due right of the poor. We neither palliate nor excuse any lapses either on the part of members or officers of the Board, but we claim that as a Board we have carried out our duties as efficiently and as economically as we were able, that we have never given indiscriminate relief either in or out of the workhouse, and in the main have usefully tried to do our duty both to the poor, who have our first claim, and to the ratepayers. ”

“ Let the poor crouch to the rich to be fed, or to live at ease under their protection; let the rich abuse the poor as things at their service, and to shew how many they have soliciting them. Let the people applaud such as provide them with pleasures, not such as have a care for their interests. Let naught that is hard be enjoined, nothing impure be prohibited.... Let not subdued provinces obey their governors as supervisors of their morality, but as masters of their fortune and the procurers of their pleasures. ”

“ The Central Authority seems to have no very settled ideals, different boards run different policies, some hanker after the flesh pots of labour cheapened by indiscriminate relief, others clamour for lower rates obtained by the inhumanity of not allowing anything but indoor relief. The guardians whose voices are raised only in the interests of the poor are scarcely heard by those who are clamouring for a lowering of the rates. ”

“ No heart-revolting cruelty stirred the public mind. No general indignation from offended national self-esteem prevailed. The stability of the public credit encouraged the circulation of capital, and by that circulation large masses of industrious poor found, if not contentment, at least daily bread. ”

“ The lawmakers of the age which we are considering were gentlemen landowners, and as such were able to exercise their cupidity in a degree which precluded all idea of justice to the poorer classes. The abuses of government, the corn-laws, the enormous tax on salt and on the various necessities of life, show somewhat of the extent to which the poor were systematically robbed by the rich. ”

“ Or, we do not hesitate to ask, if the Government had never recognized such a class of the poor as that of State’s poor,—and, above all, if compulsory charity, in any form, had never been established by our laws, would there have been a twentieth part of the wandering poor which now exists in it, or by any means an equal proportion of poor of any kind with that which is now dependent upon the taxes which are raised for them? ”

“ This is the dreadful evil that now preys on the vitals of the state, and which, unless promptly and vigorously arrested in its course, must prove, at no distant day, fatal to the welfare of the state. For this surplus population there are but two remedies: you must either enable the poor to emigrate to other countries, or you must find for them employment at home. ”

“ When an official, who ought to see that the poor have justice done them, uses them ill and cheats them of their due, how can we expect the poor starving wretches to bear their troubles meekly and to respect the rights of property? ”

“ As has been already pointed out, the tendency of the present day is towards such increase. Both Poor Law and charitable relief have greatly increased in the last decade, and all sorts of schemes for the acceptance of further responsibility by the State are in the air, all of which take the shape of further relief. And in spite of it all poverty shows no sign of diminution. On the contrary, if we may accept the statements of such an authority as Mr Rowntree, things are growing worse and worse and more hopeless. ”

“ On the industry of the labourers?—On their industry, most injurious, involving the levelling principle to a very great degree, lowering the middleman to the poor man, and the poor man who labours to the pauper supported by the parish. It tends to harden the heart of the poor man, who demands with all that authority with which the legal right to provision invests him. There is no thankfulness for what is gotten, and what is given is afforded with dislike and reluctance. ”

“ The seven or eight millions of rates raised annually for the relief of the poor are also public property,—only with this important distinction, that being a legal substitute for the share which the poor formerly enjoyed of the tithes and other ecclesiastical revenues, their destination for the poor has equity as well as law for its sanction. ”

“ But has it been attended by special hardships to the poor? all that can be said is that its opponents, who are neither few nor incapable of expressing themselves, have never been able to prove it, and that the beneficial effects of the new Poor Law, upon which this policy is based, have never been open to question. And from which districts do we hear the loudest cries of distress and destitution? It is precisely from those districts where its recommendations have been uniformly set at naught and defied. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is always, in such amusement and temptation, to a certain extent, a government of the rich by the poor, as of the poor by the rich; but the latter is the prevailing and necessary one, and it consists, when it is honourable, in the collection of the profits of labour from those who would have misused them, and the administration of those profits for the service either of the same persons in future, or of others ”

“ Guardians want those who will consider the poor; men who will visit the workhouse to rouse those too idle or too depressed to work, and to find help for those who by sickness or ill-chance have lost their footing in the rush for living. They want those who, knowing what wages can do and cannot do, will serve on relief committees, will see the poor in their distress, and, giving or not giving, will try to make them understand that care does not cease. ”

“ We hear every now and then of cases in which, owing to local maladministration, some deserving men and women, honestly struggling to keep their heads above pauperism, are left to perish of hunger or cold. We read well-authenticated, only too well-authenticated, instances of actual starvation taking place in some wealthy district of a great city. We hear of parochial funds squandered and muddled away; of the ratepayers' money wasted in extravagance, and worse than extravagance; of miserable courts and alleys where the deserving and undeserving poor are alike neglected and uncared for. ”

“ We find the Central Authority, from 1871 onwards, consistently maintaining for this class a policy of indiscriminate relief on demand, under deterrent conditions, distinctly "less eligible" than the poorest accommodation of the independent labourer, free from any trace of wish for, or attempt at, reform or cure, and intended to be uniform throughout the kingdom. ”

“ The one objection to out-relief, which is at present recognised by the poor, is that the system puts it in the power of the relieving officer to act as judge in matters of which he must be ignorant, so that he gives relief to the careless or crafty and passes over those who in self-respect hide their trouble. Pensions, too, it may be added, would be no more corrupting to the labourer who works for his country in the workshop than for the civil servant who works for his country at the desk, and the cost of pensions would be no greater than is the cost of infirmaries and almshouses. ”

“ Instead of a series of separate [131] institutions appropriately organised and equipped for the several classes of the pauper population—the aged and infirm, the children, and the adult able-bodied—the Central Authority had got established, in nearly every union, one general workhouse; nearly everywhere "the same cheap, homely building," with one common regimen, under one management, for all classes of paupers. ”

“ The thing is of course in practice an impossibility, but can any one doubt for a moment that if the enormous sums contributed annually to the support of charitable institutions were lumped in with the sums raised under the Poor Law, and judiciously and honestly disbursed amongst the poor, we need never more feel a chill come over us as we sit by our cheerful firesides, and think of our poor fellow-countrymen who are cheerless and cold. ”

“ Scarcely a session of Parliament now passes without witnessing the creation of a new commission for the management of the poor, the drainage of towns, the regulation of lodging-houses, or other matters that could be better attended to by the local authorities, were it not that the population, is being so rapidly divided into two classes widely remote from each other—the poor labourer and the rich absentee landlord or other capitalist. ”