With us everyone who has not sufficient means of subsistence we term “poor,” we assist them out of the public purse, and we consider that in so doing we obey Christian teaching. This theory and its practice are due to a slovenly habit of mind, and perhaps also to an incomplete acquaintance with Scriptural teaching. The “poor” of Bible language means obviously the deserving and unfortunate, probably the incapable, but certainly not the habitually idle and vicious. We are not led simply to infer this, for there are positive statements to this effect. St. Paul said: “If any man will not work neither shall he eat,”[24] and again: “He that doth not provide for his own house is worse than an infidel.”[25]
[The Unfortunate, the Aged, the Incapables, and the Vicious, are treated alike.]
Our forefathers were more discriminating in this respect than we are, and even in the reign of Henry VIII. the line was drawn between “poor, impotent, sick, and diseased folk, the sick in very deed and not able to work, who may be provided for, holpen and relieved, and such as be strong and lusty, who, having their limbs strong enough to labour, may be daily kept in continual labour whereby everyone of them may get their living with their own hands.” If, however, we look a little closer into the matter we shall be able to recognise at least three quite distinct classes of persons grouped together under the term “poor,” and all of whom are treated by the community very much on an equality. As we shall presently see, the rough and ready way in which we view these three groups has led to gross cruelty and injustice on the one hand, and to ill-advised assistance and help on the other.
Within the same rooms and wards of the poorhouse, or receiving assistance under the same system of out-door relief, we find those who, from innate or acquired vice, form the criminal class, undistinguished from worthy and respectable men and women and their children, whose only fault was, perhaps, that their small savings over and above the necessities of their life had been spent too carelessly, or even had, perhaps, been invested in a society administered by dishonest men; we find widows and orphans of men who have died from accident or disease while in the course of regular and honourable employment. With these will be mixed the class we have especially to study—the incapables; a poor type, with physical and mental defects, such as insanity, epilepsy, and idiocy, and with these many vagrants must be included. Where laws or regulations are framed to deal with these three classes, as if they formed one natural class, the greatest injustice of necessity follows. The law-makers have to deal with the idle and vicious as well as with the deserving and distressed, and by grouping these classes together and framing regulations to apply to all, some are of necessity treated more kindly than they deserve, while others become the victims of unmerited brutality.
This fact was first brought forcibly home to me by a case in a north country poorhouse—a case which quite represents the present disgraceful method of treating those without means of subsistence. A woman, a soldier’s widow, whose husband and three sons (all soldiers) had been killed in active service, was left without relatives. She supported herself and lived soberly until old age, when feebleness and commencing gangrene of the foot compelled her to seek the poorhouse, where she died alone and unvisited by any friend. I saw her in the next bed to a drunken prostitute. The one woman had given of her body to the country’s defence, the other had given of her body to its ruin, and yet the country treated them both alike because they were alike in want of bread.
Lawyers and law-makers have tried, with limited success, to cope with these questions ever since the first Poor-law in 1601; they have failed, perhaps, because of their point of view and of approach. The physician, accustomed as he is to study his cases, each with their peculiar symptoms, and each with their appropriate methods of treatment, would, perhaps, have done better than his legal brother. We must look deeper than the mere surface, we must not be content to give bread and pass away, and feel that our duty is done.
[Our Poor-law Regulations are at Fault.]
In reference to the first class, those who are lazy and vicious, and will not work although capable of it, we have to remember that the community is itself to some extent to blame for the present state of things.
Before 1834, the Poor-law in country districts habitually supplied the unemployed with what was considered a sufficiency, and those who maintained themselves by independent industry and capacity often fared worse than those in receipt of regular Poor-law aid. “Poor is the diet of the pauper, poorer is the diet of the small ratepayer, and poorest is the diet of the independent labourer,” remarked a witness in the Poor-law Commissioners’ Report of 1834. It cannot be denied, therefore, that there is a certain want of independence (especially perhaps in rural districts) engendered by methods of relief administered in past times. As a result of this, those without physical and mental disqualification for work fall back on the Poor-law for relief in time of distress, and, counting on the certainty of this relief, are less strenuous in their efforts to provide against the evil hour. Vice, too, is increased in those who know that during the incapacity which may follow its exercise the workhouse door is open to them, and that food and shelter are to be had between the intervals of each debauch.