V
However complete and well-organised the provision may be against destitution in any society, it can never prevent the distress which ensues upon the accidents of life, sickness and sorrow, loneliness and old age—these we shall not wholly escape even in our earthly paradise. We may indeed lessen the occasions of sickness and of premature death by a wiser and more scientific ordering of the physical setting of life and of personal habit; but no ingenuity or skill can overcome the inevitable brokenness of life in a world of time. But this very circumstance provides fellowship with the opportunity to do its most perfect work.
And real fellowship will be possible for the simple reason that “charity” will be superfluous. In modern life, the material destitution of large numbers of people has necessitated the organisation of relief on a large scale, both public and private; and while the charitable impulse is intrinsically admirable, the conditions under which it has come to be exercised have in effect widened the gulf between the rich and the poor. On the one hand the rich have contracted the habit of condescending patronage; and the poor have fallen into a habit of cunning obsequiousness. In self-defence the rich have built up a machinery of investigation and distribution which has had three disastrous results: first, it has set up the monstrous and unfair test of deservingness,—“the deserving poor” is a phrase in which the well-to-do have forever crystallised their pharisaism; second, it has set a premium upon the petty tactics of evasion and deceit among the poor, and upon a corresponding cunning and astuteness in those entrusted with the business of investigation; and third, it has eliminated from charity the one element which could make it tolerable and preserve the grace which should properly go with it—namely, friendly contact. For the most part, the relief of destitution through charitable organisations, has—because it eliminates the direct personal touch between need and supply—produced and aggravated a deep and deplorable social schism.
Nor is the case any better with the public organisation of poor relief. The English poor-law has been so completely discredited and is so near dissolution that it is hardly necessary to discuss it here. It is more impersonal in its operations than a charity organisation society; but its most evil consequence is that it has so worked as to attach a stigma to honest poverty—for the person who has received poor-relief is denied the rights of citizenship. Old age has fortunately been provided for in Great Britain in the only worthy way, by a grant of state-pensions, though the actual amount of the pension is pitifully inadequate. Yet the fact of the provision indicates a distinct advance in the sense of public justice. But we shall not make much more progress until we realise that the pauper like the plutocrat is a social product; and that such destitution as prevails to-day is due less to personal perversity than to a vicious social order. No one is so foolishly hopeful as to suppose that even the most radical social change will eliminate the prodigal and the spendthrift and the sensualist. Nevertheless, it is no longer open to question that a revolution in economic conditions would do much to remove the auxiliary causes of pauperising excess.
But the chief evil which attends our method of dealing with poverty is that it has tended to perpetuate a pauper class. Whether in the relief work of religious and charitable societies, or in the administration of public relief, we have been chiefly governed by the fact of an immediate need. We have lived in the fond hope that if the present corner could be turned, something might transpire to save the recipient of relief from another crisis; and not even the obvious fact that the crisis is chronic in the case of multitudes has shaken us out of our preoccupation with symptoms into an investigation of causes. In one of the supplementary reports of the British Poor-Law Commission, it was stated that the investigation of the cases of applicants to whom “out-door” relief was denied (the alternative being to go into the “house”), showed that only in one instance where such persons had been helped by religious organisations was there any attempt to place the person concerned on an independent economic footing. This is symptomatic of the ineptitude of our common thought about the poor. We appear to accept the fact of their dependence as chronic and incurable; and by the process of “doles” we aggravate this dependence and turn it into what we suppose it to be.
This same ineptitude has pursued society in its dealings with another class—the criminal. Criminologists do not nowadays assume the existence of a natural criminal class; but our way of treating criminals has created such a class. Both for the pauper and the criminal we require a new diagnosis. Instead of treating the pauper as an incurable social parasite we should regard him as a personal inefficient; and rather than put a premium upon his inefficiency by a continual gratuitous relief of his necessities, we should impose some discipline which may lead to personal efficiency and an ordered habit of life. As for the criminal, he is a social inefficient; and his treatment should include some provision for his training in the sense and arts of social responsibility. It is a practical recognition of this need that constitutes the contribution which men like Messrs. Thomas Mott Osborne and Homer Lane are making to the solution of a difficult problem. That some plan of temporary segregation is necessary in the treatment of the inefficient—whether personal or social—is not open to question; but the poorhouse and the prison, as we know them, only aggravate the evil which they are intended to cure.
Our increasing attention to the problem of the social misfit at an earlier stage—through the new study and treatment of mentally deficient children—will considerably reduce the proportions both of pauperism and crime. We are a long way from Samuel Butler’s vision of the time when the liar will be sent to hospital and the sick person to jail; nevertheless, the point of Butler’s extravaganza is becoming recognised in the double fact that a good deal of disease is due to preventable causes, the disregard of which is already treated as a legal offence; and that much of the delinquency that prevails originates in pathological conditions rather than in moral depravity. Especially are we on hopeful lines when we take the mentally deficient child and regard him as the subject of medical rather than of legal treatment. And we shall go yet farther when we realise that though we cannot and dare not eliminate the factor of personal responsibility, yet our social misfits are the products of our social disorder, and it is seen that while justice requires that a man shall pay the penalty of his sins, yet the same justice requires that the society which produced the sinner shall feel a corporate responsibility for his restoration. And restoration is indeed the very centre of our problem in dealing with the social misfit. For our task with the pauper and the criminal is that of making each capable of entering freely and vitally into the fellowship of free men.
Yet when we have dealt with the social misfit there will remain, life being what it is, a number of people in every community for whom the burden of life has proved too heavy or whose lives are clouded by sickness or loneliness or death. “The poor,” said Jesus, “ye have always with you.” He did not mean that we need always have physically destitute people with us; He knew better, as we know better. But the smoking flax and the bruised reed we shall ever have with us; and no society can afford to despise a ministry of comfort. Indeed, fellowship will lack its native grace if it fails to produce an unfailing stream of sympathy and consolation to the distressed. Here will be the test of the vitality of our fellowship. For our ideal of fellowship may become hardened in organisation; and personal spontaneity may be lost in a routine habit of life. And to whatever else we may be able to give an organised and official form, it is at least sure that when the ministry of comfort and help loses the touch of personal directness and spontaneity, it is from henceforth a dead and useless thing.