Practicable Socialism, New Series

by S. A. Barnett; Mrs. S. A. Barnett

The public will, during the next few months, be called upon to decide as to the authority to direct the relief of the poor. The decision cannot be easily made, and ought not to be attempted without much time and thought. One of the tests by which the two systems may be tried during the necessary delay is, I submit, whether (1) an ad hoc committee with its subject expert officials or (2) committees appointed for special objects with an independent expert official, are the more likely to administer relief without spreading demoralization, and to stimulate energy without rousing animosity.

The Able.

II. The failure of the present system with the able, the vagrant, the loafer, and the unemployed, who are physically and mentally strong, is the most marked; and reform is an immediate necessity. The Government can hardly go through another Session without doing something to prevent the growth of pauperism among comparatively young men, to check the habit of vagrancy which threatens to become violent, and to meet the demands of the honest unemployed.

The present system deals with the able-bodied by means of the workhouse—the labour yard, the casual ward, the test workhouse—and also by means of out relief and the Unemployed Workmen’s Act. The Commission—Majority and Minority—condemn each of these means.

The workhouse, we are told, creates the loafer. “The moment this class of man”—i.e., the easy-going, healthy fellow who feels no call to work—“becomes an inmate so surely does he deteriorate into a worse character still”; and we read also that “the features in the present workhouse system make it not only repellent (as is perhaps necessary), but also, as is unnecessary, degrading. Of all the spectacles of human demoralization now existing in these islands, there can scarcely be anything worse than the scene presented by the men’s day ward of a large urban workhouse during the long hours of leisure on week-days or the whole of Sundays. Through the clouds of tobacco-smoke that fill the long low room, the visitor gradually becomes aware of the presence of one or two hundred wholly unoccupied males, of every age between fifteen and ninety—strong and vicious men, men in all stages of recovery from debauch, weedy youths of weak intellect, old men dirty and disreputable ... worthy old men, men subject to fits, occasional monstrosities or dwarfs, the feeble-minded of every kind, the respectable labourer prematurely invalided, the hardened, sodden loafer, and the temporarily unemployed man who has found no better refuge. In such places there are congregated this winter certainly more than 10,000 healthy, able-bodied men.”

The labour yard, we learn, tends to become the habitual resort of the incapables, and “a stay there will demoralize even the best workmen”. “In short,” says the Minority Report, “whether as regards those whom it includes or those whom it excludes for relief, the labour yard is a hopeless failure, and positively encourages the worst kind of under-employment.” The expense of this failure is so great that in one yard the stone broken cost the Guardians £7 a ton.

Casual wards have long been known as the nurseries of a certain class of vagrant—men and women who become familiar with their methods and settle down to their use. They fail as resting-places for honest seekers after work as they travel from town to town, and they fail also—even when made harsher than prisons—to stimulate energy. Poor Law reformers, like Mr. Vallance, have through many years called for their abolition.

Test workhouses represent the supreme effort of the ingenuity of Poor Law officials, and are still recommended to Guardians. In these establishments everything which could possibly attract is excluded. The house is organized after the fashion of a prison, although the officials have neither the training nor the knowledge considered to be necessary for men who hold their fellow-men in restraint; hard and uncongenial work is enforced; the diet is of the plainest, and no association during leisure hours is permitted. The test is so severe that the house is apt to remain empty till the Guardians, overborne by the expense, admit inmates too weak to bear the strain, who therefore break down the system. The inspectors claim credit for success, because applications are prevented, but the Minority Report deals with this claim in an admirably written examination of the whole position. It is no success, for on account of the severity more men are driven on to the streets to provoke the charity of the unthinking; and it is a failure if such treatment adds to the sum of envy, hatred and malice.

The Commissioners of 1834 aimed at abolishing out-door relief for the able-bodied, and to this end the central authority and its inspectorate has worked, but exceptions have been allowed “on account of sudden or urgent necessity,” and now it is reported that 10,000 different men, mostly between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five, receive such relief in the course of the year, while at least 10,000 or 20,000 more able-bodied men are allowed out relief by the special authority of the Local Government Board. These numbers tend to increase, and will go on increasing, because nothing is done to give them “such physical or mental restorative treatment as will fit them for employment”.

The means, therefore, by which the Poor Law has attempted to deal with the able-bodied may be said to have disastrously failed. Distress has grown, and the people have been demoralized. Ill-will threatens to become violent. The nation, in a hurry to do something, passed the Unemployed Act of 1905, and the Commissioners deal faithfully with the work of the Distress Committees created under that Act. There is much in the work which is suggestive, and many recommendations, such as those which affect the use of labour and farm colonies, are founded on their experience. But the Commissioners are unanimous in the conclusion that relief works are economically useless. “Either,” they say, “ordinary work is undertaken, in which case it is merely forestalled ... or else it is sham work, which we believe to be even more demoralizing than direct relief.” “Municipal relief works” (to which the work given by district councils has approximated) “have not assisted, but rather prejudiced, the better class of workman ... they have encouraged the casual labourers by giving them a further supply of the casual work which is so dear to their hearts and so demoralizing to their character. They have encouraged and not helped the incapables; they have discouraged and not helped the capables.”