CHAPTER XIV
THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES
2. The Workhouse.
Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper.
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Pauperism is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid unveracities and God-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other.
Thomas Carlyle: “Latter-day Pamphlets,”
“The New Downing Street.”
The current cant of the day is that the alehouse leads to the workhouse. From an architectural and hygienic point of view they have much in common, and perhaps when one comes to spend one’s last years amid the unloveliness and official squareness and coldness of the workhouse one will be able to look back with a sense of grateful pleasure to the more natural squalor of the alehouse. It is a zoological fact that the human pauper, escaped for the day from a workhouse, makes like a homing bird for the alehouse, wherefrom we may draw the conclusion that the public for whom our two public houses are provided by an intelligent State prefer the alehouse as the lesser abomination of the two.
I often wonder if there is any nation in the world that possesses an appetite equal to that of our own people for Royal Commissions and reports. I admit that I have the craving strongly myself—not to sit upon Commissions, for I am a working man and the amusement is one for Bishops, Law Lords, philanthropists and the leisured classes—but I buy the reports when they come out and sometimes read them—or some of them—or some part of them—and marvel at the patience and energy and research that have gone to the making of them, and sigh over the pity of it and the heart-breaking inutility of the whole business.
Here is the report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909. The blue cover of my copy is already turning grey with old age, the pencil marks I made in the margin when I read it five years ago remind me of the splendid reforms that spread themselves out in its pages and made one feel that after all the world was a better affair than one had hitherto believed. This report is indeed literally a monument of industry. It sat from 1905 to 1909. There are over twelve hundred pages in the report itself, which you can buy for the trumpery sum of five and six. The evidence of it is contained in many volumes, and if your library is large enough and you can afford to pay the price of a large paper set, you would have reading enough for the rest of your natural life. And what has come of it all? Practically nothing. It is not to be supposed that either the report or the evidence has ever been read and studied by our ministers and rulers. A few magazine and newspaper articles have been made of it, then perhaps a book or two are written on the subject, the origin of which you can trace to the report, and after that gradually the thing sinks by its own cumbrous weight into the dead limbo of forgotten state papers. Yet if there was a problem called the reform of the Poor Law in 1905 worthy of the consideration of the good men and women who gave up a large slice of their lives to working at it surely in 1914 there is still such a problem, and some of it is at least as urgent as the questions over which our political pastors wrangle and fight with such splendid energy. To write an essay on the law and the poor in relation to the relief of distress would be to traverse the whole ground of this famous report, but for my own part I only want to call attention to an institution typical of all the faults and errors of the Poor Law—the workhouse.