[2] How does this harmonize with the practice of turning the lying-in mother out after fourteen days?
The children should be absorbed into the normal life of the population, and helped to forget they are paupers.[[3]]
[3] How does this harmonize with the practice of keeping them in barrack schools, in pauper villages?
The aged should be left in their own homes, supported by some system of State pensions, unconsciously teaching lessons of patience to those who tend them, and giving of their painfully obtained experience lessons of hope or warning.[[4]]
[4] How does this harmonize with the fact that there are thousands of people over sixty years of age in our State institutions? Has it ever occurred to the statistical inquirers to ascertain the death-rate of babies in relation to the absence of their grand-parents?
The revelation to this age is the law of development, and it can be seen in the laws which govern Society as well as those which govern Nature. Slowly has been evolved the knowledge of the duty of the State to its members. Repression of evil, pity for suffering, systematizing of relief; each has given place to the other, and all have left the Christian conscience ill at ease. Development of character is before us, and it is for the Church to “see visions” and to open the eyes of the blind to its ideals. What shall they be? As teachers of the reality of the spiritual life I would ask you, as clergy, first, to serve on poor-law boards, and, secondly, to consider each individual as an individual capable of development; each drunken man, each lawless woman, each feeble-minded creature, each unruly child, each plastic baby, each old crone, each desecrated body: let us place each side by side with Christ and their own possibilities, and then vote and work to give each an upward push, remembering that to allow freedom for choice and to withhold aid are often duties, for on all individual souls is laid the command to “work out their own salvation in fear and trembling”.
Put briefly, Christians must say, “Poverty demands prayer”.
Henrietta O. Barnett.