A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

The spirit of reform was impelling Lord Grey's Government in other directions as well as in those which led to the abolition of slavery in the Colonies, the improved conditions of the factory works and the introduction of some better method for the collecting of tithes. The state of the poor laws all over the country had long been attracting the attention of thoughtful, philanthropic, and at the same time practical men. The administration of relief to the poor was still conducted, up to Lord Grey's reforming Administration, on the same general principle as that which had been embodied in the famous statute of Queen Elizabeth. The manner in which that principle had been working during the intervening centuries was only another illustration of Burke's maxim about systems founded on the heroic virtues to which we have lately made reference in this volume. The statute of Elizabeth was based on the principle that the State, or at least the local authorities, ought to find relief for all the deserving poor. The duty of making provision for the deserving poor was left in the hands of those who managed the affairs of the parishes, of whom the local clergy and magistrates were the principal personages. The means had to be furnished by the taxpayers, and the influential men of each parish were left to decide as to the claims and the deserts of the applicants. There was no regular body answerable to public opinion, nor was there indeed any practical way in which the public of a district could very effectively express itself. Nothing could be better arranged for the development of that benevolent spirit which Sydney Smith describes as common to all humanity, and {222} under the influence of which no sooner does A hear that B is in distress than he thinks C ought at once to relieve him. Men and women had only to go and say that they were in distress, and some influential persons in the neighborhood were sure to find that the easiest way of doing a benevolent act was to provide them with orders for parochial relief inside or outside the workhouse. There seemed to be a sort of easy-going impression prevailing everywhere that when a man or a woman or a family had once been set down for relief from the rates the enrolment ought to endure as a kind of property for life, and even as an inheritance for future generations. The grant of parish relief under the old ways has been humorously likened to a State pension, which, when it has once been given, is never supposed to be revoked during the lifetime of the privileged pensioner. But the presumption in the case of those relieved by the parish had a still more abiding efficacy, for it was assumed that if a man got parish relief for himself and his family the beneficent endowment was to pass onward from generation to generation. It is quite certain that whole races of paupers began to grow up in the country, one family depending on the rates engendering another family, who were likewise to be dependent on the rates. Thus the vice of lazy and shiftless poverty was bequeathed from pauper sire to son. In the case of the ordinary man or woman there was no incitement to industry and perseverance. The idle pauper would be fed in any case, and no matter how hard he worked at the ordinary labor within his reach he could only hope to be poorly fed. Indeed, even the man who had an honest inclination for honest labor was very much in the condition of the Irish cottier tenant, described many years afterwards by John Stuart Mill as one who could neither benefit by his industry nor suffer by his improvidence.

[Sidenote: 1832—Some defects in the poor-law system]

The system may be said without exaggeration to have put a positive premium on immorality among the poorer class of women in a district, for an unmarried girl who had pauper offspring to show was sure to receive the liberal benefit of parochial relief. Pity was easily aroused for {223} her youth, her fall, her deserted condition when her lover or betrayer had taken himself off to some other district. Any tale of deceived innocence was readily believed, and so far as physical comforts go the unmarried mother was generally better off than the poor toiling and virtuous wife of the hard-worked laborer who found her family growing and her husband's wages without any increase. Then, of course, there was all manner of jobbery, and a certain kind of corruption among parish officials and the local tradesmen and employers of labor generally, which grew to be an almost recognized incident of the local institutions. Labor could be got on cheaper terms than the ordinary market rates if the employers could have men or women at certain seasons of the year whom the parish was willing to maintain in idleness for the rest of the time. Small contracts of all kinds were commonly made, in this sort of fashion, between parish officials and local employers, and the whole system of relief seemed to become converted into a corrupting influence, pervading the social life and showing its effects in idleness, immorality, and an infectious disease of pauperism. Owing to the many misinterpretations of the laws of settlement it was often easy for a rich and populous district to fling much of its floating pauperism on some poorer region, and thus it frequently happened that the more poverty-stricken the parish the greater was the proportion of unsettled pauperism for which it had to provide. In many districts the poorer classes of ratepayers were scarcely a degree better off than the actual paupers whom they were taxed to support. Thus many a struggling family became pauperized in the end because of the increase in the rates which the head of the family could no longer pay, and the exhausted breadwinner, having done his best to keep himself and his family independent, had at last to eat the bread of idleness from parish relief, or to starve with his family by the road-side.

Things had come to such a pass indeed that many earnest and capable observers, like Lord Brougham, Mr. Nassau Senior, and Miss Martineau, were beginning to advocate the doctrine that no remedy could be found for {224} the system of legalized poor relief short of its total abolition. It was gravely contended by many reformers, whose guiding spirit was pure love of humanity, that the best course for the Government to take would be to abolish the poor-relief system altogether, and leave the really deserving poor to the mercy of private benevolence. By such a measure, it was contended, private charity would be left to find out its own, and would, before long, find out its own, and the charity thus given would carry with it no demoralizing effect, but would be bestowed, as all true charity is bestowed, with the object of enabling those whom it helped to help themselves after a while. The owner of an estate, it was argued, can easily find out where there is genuine distress among those who depend upon him, and can sustain them through their time of need, so that when their hour of sickness or enforced idleness is over they may be able to begin again with renewed energy, and work with the honest purpose of making themselves independent. It was urged that the operation of the legalized poor law relief could only create new pauperism wherever its unwholesome touch was felt. It would impress on the well-inclined and the industrious the futility of honest and persevering endeavor, inasmuch as idleness could get itself better cared for than laborious poverty. Idleness and immorality, it was argued, were well housed and fed, while honest independence and virtue were left outside in cold and hunger.

[Sidenote: 1832-33—A commission on poor-law relief]

The study of political economy was even already beginning to be a part of the education of most men who took any guiding place or even any observant interest in the national life. Writers who dealt with such subjects were beginning to find readers among the general public. Some of the members of Lord Grey's own Administration had taken a close interest in such questions. The whole subject of poor relief and its distribution was one of the earliest which came under the consideration of the Liberal Government after the passing of the Reform Bill. It was clear that something would soon have to be done, and, as the Whig ministers had a good deal of other work on their {225} hands, the natural course, at such a time, was to appoint a commission which should inquire into the whole system of poor-law relief, and report to the Government as to the best means for its reorganization. Such a commission was appointed and set at once to its work. Among the commissioners and the assistant-commissioners nominated for the purpose were some men whose names are well remembered in our own days. One of those was Mr. Nassau Senior, a man of great ability and wide practical information, who distinguished himself in many other fields of literary work, as well as that which belonged to what may be called the literature of pure economics. Another was Mr. Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Chadwick, who was a living and an active presence, until a very short time ago, among those who devoted themselves to the study and the propagation of what are called social science principles, and whose work was highly valued by so well qualified a critic as John Stuart Mill. The commission made careful inquiry into the operation of the poor-law relief system, and presented a report which marked an epoch in our social history, and might well have a deep interest even for the casual student of to-day. The result of the inquiries made was such as to satisfy the commissioners that the administration of the poor law had increased the evils of pauperism, wherever it found them already in existence, and had created and fostered evils of the same kind, even in regions which had not known them before they were touched by its contagion. The report of the commissioners pronounced that the existing system of poor law was "destructive to the industry and honesty and forethought of the laborers, to the wealth and morality of the employers of labor and the owners of property, and to the mutual good-will and happiness of all." This may be thought a very sweeping condemnation, but the more closely the evidence is studied the more clearly it will be seen that where the poor-relief system had any effect worth taking into calculation this was the sort of effect it produced. The real objects of the legalized poor-law relief system were well and even liberally described in the report of the {226} commissioners. The object of poor relief, as the commissioners defined it, should be to make provision for that proportion, to be found in almost every community, which is plunged into such a condition of distress that it never can hope to be self-supporting again, and for that more fluctuating proportion made up of those who at the time are unable to support themselves, but whom some temporary relief may enable to return to their former condition of independence. In each class of cases it ought to be made equally clear, before public relief were called in, that those in distress, continuous or temporary, had no near relatives in a condition to afford them reasonable assistance without undue sacrifice. Of course it was understood that these conditions included the men and women who, owing to some temporary lack of employment, were actually unable to find the means of living by their own honest labor. The ideas of the commissioners were not pedantically economical in their range, nor did they insist that public relief must be given only as the reward of personal integrity when visited by undeserved misfortune. It was freely admitted that even where men and women had allowed themselves, by idleness or carelessness, to sink into actual poverty, it was better to give them temporary relief at the public expense than allow them to take up with the ways of crime, or leave them to pay the penalty of their wrongdoings by death from starvation. But it was strictly laid down that a healthy system of public relief was to help men and women for a time, in order that they might be able to help themselves once again, as soon as possible, and to make provision for those who had done their work and could do no more, and who had no near relatives in a condition to keep them from starvation. The report of the commissioners pointed out that the existing system "collects and chains down the laborers in masses, without any reference to the demand for their labor; that, while it increases their numbers, it impairs the means by which the fund for their subsistence is to be reproduced, and impairs the motives for using those means which it suffers to exist; and that every year and every day these evils are becoming {227} more overwhelming in magnitude and less susceptible of cure."

[Sidenote: 1833—Plans to improve the relief system]

The passages which we have quoted are taken from the recommendations of Mr. Chadwick. He goes on to say that, "of those evils, that which consists merely in the amount of the rates—an evil great when considered by itself, but trifling when compared with the moral effects which I am deploring—might be much diminished by the combination of workhouses, and by substituting a rigid administration and contract management for the existing scenes of neglect, extravagance, jobbery, and fraud." Mr. Chadwick points out that "if no relief were allowed to be given to the able-bodied or to their families, except in return for adequate labor or in a well-regulated workhouse, the worst of the existing sources of evil—the allowance system—would immediately disappear; a broad line would be drawn between the independent laborers and the paupers; the numbers of paupers would be immediately diminished, in consequence of the reluctance to accept relief on such terms, and would be still further diminished in consequence of the increased fund for the payment of wages occasioned by the diminution of rates; and would ultimately, instead of forming a constantly increasing proportion of our whole population, become a small, well-defined part of it, capable of being provided for at an expense less than one-half of the present poor rates." And finally it was urged that "it is essential to every one of these improvements that the administration of the poor laws should be intrusted, as to their general superintendence, to one central authority with extensive powers; and, as to their details, to paid officers, acting under the consciousness of constant superintendence and strict responsibility." On these reports and recommendations the new measure for the reorganization of the poor-law system was founded. The main objects of the measure were to divide these countries, for poor-relief purposes, into areas of regular and, in a certain sense, of equal proportions, so that the whole burden of poverty should not be cast for relief on one particular district, while a neighboring and much richer {228} district was able to escape from its fair measure of liability; to have the relief administered not by local justices, or parish clergymen, but by representative bodies duly elected and responsible to public opinion; and by the creation of one great central board charged with the duty of seeing to the proper administration of the whole system. Thus, it will be observed that the main principle of the Reform Bill, the principle of representation, had been already accepted by statesmanship as the central idea of a department of State which had nothing to do with the struggles of political parties.

[Sidenote: 1834—Passage of the Poor-law Bill]

The measure when it came before Parliament met, of course, with strong opposition, first in the House of Commons and then in the House of Lords. Much of the opposition came, no doubt, from men of old-fashioned ways, who dreaded and hated any changes in any institutions to which they had been accustomed, and who held that even pauperism itself acquired a certain sanctity from the fact that it had been fostered and encouraged by the wisdom of so many succeeding generations. Some of the opposition, however, was inspired by feelings of a more purely sentimental, and therefore perhaps of a more respectable order. It was urged that the new system, if carried into law, would bear hardly on the deserving as well as the undeserving people; that the workhouse test would separate the husband from wife, and the father from the children; and, above all, that certain clauses of the new measure would leave the once innocent girl who had been led astray by some vile tempter to bear the whole legal responsibility as well as the public shame of her sin. It is not necessary for us now to go over at any length the long arguments which were brought up on both sides of the controversy. Many capable and high-minded observers were carried away by what may be called the sentimental side of the question, and forgot the enormous extent of the almost national corruption which the measure was striving to remove, in their repugnance to some of the evils which it did not indeed create, but which it failed to abolish. One weakness common to nearly all the arguments employed against the {229} measure came from the facility there was for putting out of sight altogether, during such a process of reasoning, the fact that the daily and hourly effect of the existing system was to force the deserving and hard-working poor to sink into that very pauperism which it was the object of all law-makers to diminish, or to abolish altogether. The wit of man could not devise any system of poor relief which should never go wrong in its application, should never bear harshly on men and women who deserved, and were striving for, an honest and independent subsistence.