BEING PART I. OF THE MINORITY REPORT OF THE
POOR LAW COMMISSION
Edited, with Introduction, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Demy 8vo, xx and 604 pp. 7s. 6d net. Uniform with
"English Local Government"
Bluebooks, it has been said, are places of burial. The original edition of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Agencies dealing with the Unemployed is a ponderous tome of seven pounds weight, crowded with references, footnotes, and appendices, impossible either to handle or to read. Mr. and Mrs. Webb have, therefore, rescued from this tomb the Minority Report signed by the Dean of Norwich, Messrs. Chandler and Lansbury, and Mrs. Webb herself. By omitting all the notes and references, and printing the text in clear type on a convenient octavo page, they present the reader with something which he can hold with comfort by his fireside.
This Minority Report is a new departure in such documents. More than 20,000 copies have already been disposed of, and it is still selling like the last new novel. It is readable and even exciting. It is complete in itself. It presents, in ordered sequence, page by page, a masterly survey of what is actually going on in our workhouses and in the homes of those maintained on Outdoor Relief. It describes in precise detail from carefully authenticated evidence what is happening to the infants, to the children of school age, to the sick, to the mentally defective, to the widows with children struggling on their pittances of Outdoor Relief, to the aged and infirm inside the workhouse and outside. It sets forth the overlapping of the Poor Law with the newer work of the Education and Public Health Authorities, and the consequent waste and confusion. It gives a graphic vision of the working of the whole Poor Law machinery in all parts of the United Kingdom, which is costing us nearly twenty millions sterling per annum.
The volume concludes with a Scheme of Reform, of novel and far-reaching character, which is elaborately worked out in detail, involving the abolition of the workhouse, the complete disappearance of the Poor Law, and the transfer of the care of the children, the sick, the mentally defective, and the aged to the several committees of the Town and County Councils already administering analogous services, in order that we may now, in the twentieth century, set ourselves to prevent destitution, instead of waiting until it occurs.
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.