The evil grew worse rather than better, and by the time of the great Governor Cochrane, in 1825, it had assumed the form of an inveterate social disease. Many able-bodied applicants for relief were provided with work in public employments, and the wholesome warning was added that those who refused such work would under no circumstances be entitled to relief. Governor Cochrane did not shrink from indicating the real cause of the distress. "Those who are upon wages," he wrote, "receive a sum during the summer months, which, if properly husbanded, would, together with the produce of their own exertion after the fishery has ceased, be fully adequate to the support of themselves and families for the following winter. Yet I am led to believe that a large portion of this is dissipated before many weeks or days have elasped after the fishing season has terminated, and in consequence of such profusion many families are left to want and misery."
The generality of the system destroyed in time that healthy dread of pauperism which, as an economic factor, is of the highest national importance. The receipt of poor relief lost the stigma assigned to it with rough justice by Anglo-Saxon independence, and in 1863, out of a total public expenditure of £90,000, the astounding proportion of £30,000 was expended upon the necessities of the poor.
Far-seeing observers had long before pointed out that the remedy for these disorders must be a radical one. Improvidence among the poorer classes is familiar to economists in more experienced societies than that of Newfoundland, and may be accepted as a permanent element in the difficulty. The real hope lay in opening up, on remunerative lines, industries which would occupy the poor in the lean months. Nor was Newfoundland without such resources, if the capital necessary for their development could have been found. A penetrating railway system, by its indirect effects upon the mining and agricultural interests, would have done much to solve the problem of the unemployed. The difficulty was that the state of the public finances was in no condition to undertake costly schemes of betterment. In a later chapter we shall see the Government, after exhausting the resources of loans, looking to a desperate remedy to conquer its powerlessness for enterprise.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] Prowse, p. 473.