The advocates of children’s penny dinners may take these facts as a strong argument in favour of their scheme, and feel that in this simple method is the solution of the difficulty. But those who so think cannot have considered the question in all its bearings. If feeding the children enables us to limit the power of disease, it does so by putting fresh weapons into the hands of the Greed of certain classes or individuals, which is so ill-curbed and ineffectively conquered as to be nothing loth to take advantage of every opportunity of working its cruel will.
If the children are fed at school it enables the mother to go out to work. The supply of female labour is thus increased, and married women can offer their work at lower wages than widows or single ones, because their labour is only supplementary to that of their husbands. The consequence is that wages go down, because more women are in the labour market than are needed, and those get the work who will take it for the least remuneration. Thus, though Mrs. Harris may get work, her children being ‘now fed by the ladies round at the school,’ she does so at the expense of lowering Jane Metcalf’s wages; and, as Jane is working to help her widowed mother to keep the four younger children off the parish, the only result is that Tommie and Lizzie and the two baby Metcalfs get worse food, and Jane finds life harder, and sometimes sees temptation through magnifying-glasses.
Besides these economic results which must inevitably follow the plan of feeding the children on any large scale, there are others which ensue from the lightening of parental responsibility, and these everyone who knows the poor can foresee without the gift of prophecy; the idle father is made more idle, the gossiping mother less controlled, and from the drunken parent is taken the last feeble bond which binds him to sobriety and its hopeful consequences. But perhaps as important as any of these results is the evil which follows the taking the children from the home influence. In our English love of home is one of our hopes for the future; and not the least conspicuous as a moral training-ground is the family dinner-table. There the mother can teach the little lessons of good manners and neat ways, and the larger truths of unselfishness and thoughtfulness. There the whole family can meet, and from the talks over meals, during the time which, as things now are, is perhaps the only leisure of the busy mechanic, may grow that sympathy between the older and younger people which must refresh and gladden both. No; it is not by any charitable effort that this poverty must be fought. A national want must be met by a national effort, and the thought of the political economist, which has hitherto been devoted to the question of production and accumulation of wealth, must now turn its attention to the problem of its right use and distribution, recognising that ‘the wise use of wealth in developing a complete human life is of incomparably the greater moment both to men and nations.’ While more than half the English people are unable to live their best life or reach their true standard of humanity, it is useless to congratulate ourselves on our national supremacy or class our nation as wealthy.
Some economists will reply that these sad conditions are but the result of our freedom; that the boasted ‘liberty’ in our land must result in the few strong making themselves stronger, and in the many weak suffering from their weakness. But is this necessarily so? Is this the only result to be expected from human beings having the power to act as they please? Are not love, goodwill, and social instincts as truly parts of human character as greed, selfishness, and sulkiness; and may we not believe that human nature is great enough to care to use its freedom for the good of all? Men have done noble things to obtain this freedom. They have loved her with the ardour of a lover’s love, with the patience of a silver wedded life; and now that they have her, is she only to be used to injure the weak, and to make life cruel and almost impossible to the large majority? ‘What is the right use of freedom?’ The ancient answer was, ‘To love God.’ And can we love God whom we have not seen when we love not our brother whom we have seen?
Henrietta O. Barnett.
II.
RELIEF FUNDS AND THE POOR.[1]
[1] Reprinted, by permission, from the Nineteenth Century of November 1886.
The poverty of the poor and the failure of the Mansion House Relief Fund are the facts which stand out from the gloom of a winter when dark weather, dull times, and discontent united to depress both the hopes of the poor and the energy of their friends. The memory of days full of unavailing complaint and of aimless pity is one from which all minds readily turn, quieting their fears with the assumption that the poverty was exaggerated or that the generosity of the rich is ample for all occasions.