The Principle of Compulsion,—alien, as we have shown, to the whole spirit of the Report of 1834—had, by 1907, only been adopted here and there. The Majority proposals of 1909, far from reverting in this respect to those of 1834, not only heartily adopt such compulsion as has already entered into the Poor Law, but also carry the principle much further. These proposals involve the compulsory enforcement of pauperism on whole sections of the community who are considered to need public assistance, but who do not wish to accept it—on the helpless and friendless aged who get into an insanitary condition; on the children of "Ins and Outs," and of other parents who are leading improper lives; on the feeble-minded who are, nevertheless, not so mentally defective as to be able to be certified as of unsound mind; on sick persons not properly cared for in their own homes; on children suffering from ophthalmia or other contagious diseases; on persons of either sex suffering from venereal diseases; on "unmarried mothers" resorting to the workhouse in their hour of need; and on able-bodied men and women who become repeatedly chargeable owing to their own misconduct. All these persons so diverse in their characters, their circumstances, and their needs, ought, it is expressly recommended, to be compulsorily detained in a Poor Law Institution or at the Poor Law expense, at the instance of the new Poor Law Authority. Whenever deemed necessary, they are to be made subject to what is euphemistically called "An Order for Continuous Treatment," under which their compulsory detention may extend to as long as three years. "The term detention," it is said, "is perhaps, however, infelicitous. It is generally associated with the idea of punishment by imprisonment. Our primary object in proposing detention is neither punishment nor imprisonment. We aim at affording opportunities for applying ameliorative treatment to particular individuals over a continuous period. We desire to substitute for the present system of incontinuous and inefficacious relief a continuity of care and treatment which shall benefit both the recipient and the community.... All these cases have this common characteristic, viz. that the absence of power of continuous treatment constitutes a danger either to the individual or the State."[846]
Finally, the third of the "Principles of 1907"—that of Universal Provision—far from meeting with objection, receives repeated endorsement. The Majority accept, without a word of criticism, the provision of national pensions for all the persons over seventy years of age below a certain income-limit, and they do not even suggest the maintenance of the present temporary disqualification of those who have received parochial relief since January 1, 1908. They endorse the universal provision by the Local Education Authority of medical inspection and diagnosis for all children in attendance at the public elementary schools; though they think that the contemplated provision of medical treatment for these children should not be a function of the Local Education Authority. They even recommend the universal provision of medical attendance for every sick person who applies for it, with free choice of doctors; though it is urged that inquiry should be subsequently made as to the applicants' means, and that such as may be found to be able to pay for the service rendered to them should be required to do so. Hospital accommodation and treatment is, moreover, to be provided at the public expense, without charge and without disfranchisement wherever it is deemed to be required, including whatever is necessary for the proper treatment of phthisis. Finally, the National Government is to undertake an entirely new service; to be available without charge to every one who cares to use it, irrespective of his affluence; and to be as ubiquitous and as universal as the Post Office. By a national system of Labour Exchanges, the present disjointed efforts of innumerable seekers after jobs are to be replaced by a public organisation, the business of which will be to know all the vacancies and all the applicants, and to find a man for every job, if not a job for every man. All this represents, not only the endorsement of the Principle of Universal Provision so far as it has already gone, but also a considerable further increase of the communistic activity of the State.
The Plea for a Single Destitution Authority
When, however, we study the detailed recommendations of the Majority Report, and consider the probable working of the machinery that they would set up, we discover, notwithstanding all the elaborately sympathetic phrases, a very definite trend backward to the "Principles of 1834," in a manner which seems to us calculated ingeniously to nullify the apparent repudiation, and in reality to leave the situation more confused than before.
We have to note, in the first place, that the Majority Report lays the utmost stress on the importance of retaining in each locality what is definitely a "Destitution Authority." "It should," they declare, "be a fundamental condition of the assistance system of the future that the responsibility for the due and effective relief of all necessitous persons at the public expense should be in the hands of one, and only one, authority in each County and County Borough."[847] To this principle they recur again and again as of paramount importance. In retaining this General Destitution Authority, and in emphasising the necessity for the treatment of all sections—the infants, the children, the sick, the aged, the prematurely incapacitated, the able-bodied unemployed—being committed to its charge, the Majority Report may fairly claim to be standing on the same ground as the authors of the 1834 Report, though with a significant difference. To the Royal Commission of 1834 the single all-embracing Destitution Authority was not a matter of principle at all, but a necessity, which no one questioned. Throughout the whole country there had been only one kind of Local Authority which gave any sort of public assistance to the poor, and that was the Poor Law Authority. The 1834 Report could, accordingly, take it for granted that all sections of the persons to be relieved at the public expense on the ground of their necessities must be dealt with, as destitute persons, by one and the same authority. In 1909 the position has become quite different. There have grown up, since 1834, other public authorities in each district, which provide, independently of the Poor Law, this or that form of public assistance to persons who require it, sometimes to all who apply, sometimes to those only who prove their need. The Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, the Local Lunacy Authorities, the Local Pension Authorities, and the Local Unemployed Authorities are, in fact, spending in the aggregate on the children, the sick, the mentally defective, the aged and the able-bodied unemployed, in their several forms of public assistance, out of the same fund of rates and taxes, more than twice as much every year as all the Poor Law Authorities put together. To the Royal Commission of 1909 the retention of a general Destitution Authority, dealing with all sections of destitute persons as destitute persons, was, therefore, not a necessity. It was a deliberate choice, and we find them erecting it into a principle. This principle does not, as might perhaps be supposed, apply only to the provision of maintenance. It is expressly asserted that the schooling and industrial training of the persons relieved and the medical attendance of the sick, so far as it is provided at the public expense, must equally form part of the work of the new Poor Law Authorities. Even the provision of Day Industrial Schools for destitute uncared-for children, of public Sanatoria for phthisis patients, and of Rescue Homes for girl mothers, in so far as undertaken at the public expense, must be the work of the new Poor Law Authorities.[848] It is part of the same idea to insist on the importance of there being established a single "Public Assistance Service ... which should include all officers concerned with the supervision control and disciplinary treatment of the poor ... not only the ... relieving officers both male and female" but also "masters, matrons, and superintendents of institutions of every grade," whether for the children, the sick, or the able-bodied unemployed. All these officers, whatever their technical duties, are to have a certain common training, to receive certificates of different grades, to enjoy opportunities of promotion from one post to another, and to be made to realise, throughout their whole service, that they are "concerned with the moral training of those committed to their care."[849] Thus, all the various specialised institutions, which are to replace the General Mixed Workhouse—the nursery, the residential school, the hospital, the dispensary, the "industrial institution" for the able-bodied, the Rescue Home for girl mothers, the phthisis sanatorium and the home for the helpless aged—are to be administered by officers of a single homogeneous interchangeable service, deliberately focusing their attention on the moral accompaniments assumed to be characteristic of destitute persons as such, whether these are children or adults, sick or whole. "From the point of view thus indicated," explains an authoritative exponent of the Majority Report, "there is, as it were, an army of social healers to be trained and organised; and it is like the army of war in the fundamental fact that it is to be disciplined and animated with a single spirit and purpose, however varied and specialised may be the duties that fall within its range. The whole of these proposals are founded on the conviction that there is a problem common and peculiar to the entire range of destitution or necessitousness, demanding a common and peculiar method of dealing with it."[850] This, indeed, is the fundamental difference between the Majority Report and the Minority Report. "The antagonism," continues this exponent, "cannot be put too strongly. The Majority proceed upon the principle that where there is a failure of social self-maintenance in the sense above defined, there is a defect in the citizen character, or at least a grave danger to its integrity; and that, therefore, every case of this kind raises a problem which is 'moral' in the sense of affecting the whole capacity of self-management, to begin with in the person who has failed, and secondarily in the whole community so far as influenced by expectation and example."[851]
In this cogent argument for the retention of the Category of the Destitute, and of one Authority, and one Authority only, for all classes of destitute persons, we see two distinct and separate assumptions, one as to fact, and the other as to social expediency. We have first the suggestion that, in all classes of persons who need maintenance at the hands of the State, there is, as a matter of fact, a moral defect, common to the whole class and requiring specific treatment. Secondly, we see creeping out from behind this suggestion a further assumption as to the policy which ought to be pursued by the Poor Law Authority. This Authority, which is to have in its charge all the heterogeneous population of infants, children, sick and mentally defective persons, the aged and the infirm, the widows, the vagrants, and the unemployed, is to treat them, not with a single eye, to what is best calculated to turn them, or any of them, into efficient citizens, not even with a single eye to what will most successfully remedy the "moral defect" which they are assumed all to possess, but with the quite different object of warning off or deterring, "by expectation and example," other persons from applying for like treatment. In other words, we must, by keeping all the different varieties of people who require State aid under one Authority, and under one that assumes the existence of this "moral defect," retain for all alike, not only the "stigma of pauperism," but also a method of provision which will "deter" others from coming to be treated. We find ourselves, in short, back at the "Principles of 1834."[852]
With this clue to their meaning, it becomes possible to understand the main constructive proposals of the Majority Commissioners. The most distinctive feature of these proposals, as well as the most novel, is the setting up in every district, side by side, of two separate organisations for the assistance of the poor; one to deal with one set of people and the other with another set; one, the "Public Assistance Authority," to administer the Poor Law, at the expense of the rates, whilst the other, the Voluntary Aid Committee, to carry out the desires of the charitable, mainly out of private funds.[853] This proposal is, in our judgment, a bold attempt to get back the "Principles of 1834" in all their austerity. From the writings of Chadwick and Nassau Senior down to the latest pronouncements of the Charity Organisation Society, it has always been held that any Poor Law administration according to the "Principles of 1834," involved the co-existence of voluntary charity sufficiently well-organised to prevent the deserving person from falling under the deterrent conditions of the Poor Law, and from being subject to the stigma of pauperism. According to this view, which received the endorsement of Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen's celebrated Minute of 1870, the public assistance of the Poor Law Authority is designed and intended only for the undeserving, it being assumed that those worthy of anything better than the Poor Law supplied ought to be provided for by organised charity. When we find the Majority Report explicitly "accepting the principle of Mr. Goschen's Minute";[854] setting up in every district a Voluntary Aid Committee to carry out this principle; definitely recommending that rules should be made requiring certain classes of applicants to apply to the Voluntary Aid Committee, and certain others to the public Authority, whether the applicants like it or not;[855] and expressly stipulating that the treatment provided by the latter is to be "less eligible" than that which the former may be pleased to prescribe,[856] we cannot help feeling that the policy of the future "Public Assistance Authority" is, after all, to be the Poor Law of 1834, dealing only (as is assumed) with the worthless and the undeserving whom the charitable have, because of their character, refused to aid, and to whom the New Poor Law is to extend only "less eligible" treatment.[857] If the new Public Assistance Authorities are really intended to proceed on "curative and restorative" principles, and "to widen, strengthen, and humanise the Poor Law," why is so much stress laid on Mr. Goschen's Minute (which was based on a "deterrent" and "negative" Poor Law), and why is it so important to rescue, by means of a Voluntary Aid Committee, all the deserving cases from the clutches of the Public Assistance Authority? If the treatment applied by the Public Assistance Authority is really to be that calculated to be what is most "curative and restorative" to them, why should the "deserving" cases be debarred from it? In this ingenious mapping out of the relative spheres of Voluntary Charity and the Poor Law, we see embodied, in the most plausible and the most practical form, the two-fold assumption of Professor Bosanquet, namely, that those for whom provision is made by the Poor Law are persons with a moral defect, whom it is necessary to treat in such a way as to discourage, "by expectation and example," others from applying for the public treatment.
We are not ourselves surprised to find the Majority Report, which started out with an acceptance of the "Principles of 1907," thus reverting in its practical proposals to the "Principles of 1834." What was brought out by the elaborate investigations of the Royal Commission of 1905-9 was that, however successful the new principles had proved in other hands, it was neither expedient nor practicable for a Poor Law Authority, just because it was a Poor Law Authority, to administer relief on the lines of Curative Treatment, Compulsion, and Universal Provision. Thus, the two halves of the Majority Report are incompatible with each other. If there is to be, under the name of the Public Assistance Authority, a general Destitution Authority, there cannot, in fact, be any universal or whole-hearted adoption of the "Principles of 1907," even to the extent to which they receive apparent endorsement.