The principle of less eligibility, or, to put it in the words of the report, that “the situation of the individual relieved” shall not “be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class,” had for its purpose the restoration of the dignity of work and the steadying of the labour market.
Put briefly, the Commission said, “Poverty demands principles.”
The workhouse system, with all its ramifications, has grown out of these two principles, and in its development it has, if not wholly dropped the principles, at least considerably confused them. National uniformity no longer exists, even as an ideal. Less eligibility is forgotten, as boards vie with each other to produce more costly and up-to-date institutions. Out-relief is still given, after investigation and to certain classes of applicants and under particular conditions; but the creation of the spirit of institutionalism is the main result of the 1834 commission.
And now, to-day, what do we see? An army of 602,094 paupers, some 221,531 of whom are hidden away in monster institutions. Let us face the facts, calmly realize that one person in every thirty-eight is dependent on the rates, either wholly or partially.
Where are the old, the honoured old? In their homes, teaching their grand-children reverence for age and sympathy for weakness? No; sitting in rows in the workhouse wards waiting for death, their enfeebled lives empty of interest, their uncultivated minds feeding on discontent, often made querulous or spiteful by close contact.
Where are the able-bodied who are too ignorant and undisciplined to earn their own livelihood? Are they under training, stimulated to labour by the gift of hope? No; for the most part they are in the workhouses. Have you ever seen them there? Resentment on their faces, slackness in their limbs, individuality merged in routine, kept there, often fed and housed in undue comfort, but sinking, ever sinking, below the height of their calling as human beings and Christ’s brothers and sisters?
Where are the 69,080 children who at the date of the last return were wholly dependent on the State? In somebody’s home? Sharing somebody’s hearth? Finding their way into somebody’s heart? No; 8,659 are boarded out, but 21,366 are still in workhouses and workhouse infirmaries, and 20,229 in large institutions; disciplined, taught, drilled, controlled, it is true, often with kindliness and conscientious supervision, but for the most part lacking in the music of their lives that one note of love, which alone can turn all from discord to harmony.
Where are the sick, the imbecile, the decayed, worn out with their lifelong fight with poverty? Are they adequately classified? Are the consumptive in open-air sanitoria? the imbeciles tenderly protected, while encouraged to use their feeble brains? No; they are in infirmaries, often admirably conducted, but divorced from normal life and its refreshment or stimulus, deprived of freedom, put out of sight in vast mansions; all sorts of distress often so intermingled as to aggravate disorders and embitter the sufferer’s dreary days.
And yet we all know that the rates are very heavy, and that the struggling poor are cruelly handicapped to keep the idle, the old, the young, the sick. We have all read of the culpable extravagance and dishonest waste which goes on behind the high walls of the palatial institutions governed by the “guardians,” who should be the guardians of the public purse as well as of the helpless poor.
The village built for the children of the Bermondsey Union has cost over £320 per bed, and last year each child kept there cost £1 0s. 6½d. per week. It is said that the porcelain baths provided for the children of the Mile End Union were priced at from £18 to £20 each, while it is stated that the cost of erecting and equipping the pauper village for the children chargeable to the Liverpool Select Vestry worked out at £330 per inmate. For England and Wales the pauper bill was in 1905 £13,851,981, or £15 13s. 3¼d. for each pauper.