"'He's ill in bed to-day. He's turned seventy-three. I'm seventy-five myself. We've been living on his club money until now. He had six months' full pay and six months' half-pay. That's as much as the club allows. Now we've got nothing. He worked up to a little more than a year ago; At seventy-three he can't work any longer.'
"'We are very sorry,' says the Chairman, 'but the Poor Law practice is to ask old people like you to come into the workhouse.'
"'Anything but that, sir,' pleads the old lady tearfully. 'Both of us over seventy; we should feel it so much now after working all our lives. We can look after ourselves outside if you can give us a little help.'
"Here, then, you have an honest, hard-working old couple still faced with nothing but the workhouse, although they have been thrifty and done everything which the political promoters of old-age pensions say ought to be done. We made full inquiries, and for a time at least we thought we would meet their wishes and let them live outside. We gave them six shillings a week, and watched the case carefully. We saw that to eke out existence, one by one their articles of furniture were going. Struggle and strive as they did on their six shillings a week, they would have been compelled to come into the House ultimately after a few further stages of this system of scientific starvation if we hadn't found outside help for them from another quarter."
"You want, then, to base out-relief, like an old-age pension, on the Living Wage principle?"
"No other plan will work. No other plan is just," he said in his earnest way. "The out-relief ought to be the pension. There are a lot of old people receiving out-relief grants of three or four shillings. What is the result? They toil and struggle and pine outside on an amount which barely keeps body and soul together. They reach the workhouse at last, as a rule, through the infirmary. That means they break down and have to get medical orders for admission. It has been proved that thirty per cent. of the people in Poor Law infirmaries are suffering ailments of some kind or other due to want of proper nourishment.
"That is what I mean when I say that the present Poor Law, as Bumbledom would administer it, has nothing better to prescribe than scientific starvation to old people who refuse the House. If one is foolish enough to grow old without being artful enough to get rich, this world is the wrong place to be in.
"When old age comes to working people, both thrifty and unthrifty have in most instances to turn to one of two things—precarious charity or the Poor Law. Charity is a splendid exercise for many people, but no law or custom exists compelling its practice. Now the Poor Law can be enforced; only it has been used to terrorise the poor. The State sets up a system to save old people from starvation, and then allows it to be used to perpetuate starvation.
"It won't do. So long as we have this system, I'm going to make not the worst use of it, but the best use of it. And I believe in paying old-age pensions through the Poor Law. The Poor Law ought not to degrade any more than the Rich Law degrades under which Ministers and officers of the State receive their pensions. Why do I say pay pensions through the Poor Law? Because it is here. It is something to begin with at once. It is the thin edge of the wedge of a system of universal old-age pensions, free and adequate."
Pending the adoption of some national system, he practises in Poplar the policy he urges in public, that of paying a living pension through the Poor Law.