THE STATE AS GUARDIAN
From a leading article in _The Times_, October 7, 1913:
“They (women) are resolved, we may take it, that laws and
customs which do not recognise that their children are the
children of the nation are behind the times and must be
altered. Because they are the children of the nation, the
nation owes them all the care that a mother owes to her own
child. Because they are the future nation, the nation can only
neglect them to its own hurt and undoing. That is a law of life
which is proved up to the hilt by the bitter and humiliating
experience of a large proportion of the disease and mortality
and crime in our homes and hospitals and asylums and prisons.
But it is a law of life which also carries with it this further
truth—that the nation’s children are the nation’s opportunity.”
What is needed is the true fulfilment of human parenthood which is a
natural unforced and unforceable relation of the spirit as well as of
the flesh. Money, and the efficient, skilled service it procures, can
be provided from any source. But that close, personal affection and
watchfulness essential to children which no other guardianship can
replace can only be given by parents. Yet even parents can be thwarted
and embittered by crushing toil and slavish drudgery until their natural
affection is destroyed. The nation needs the active and free co-operation
of fathers and mothers in the upbringing of its children, and it must
enable them to do their share of the work.
At the present moment the nation, as super-guardian of its children,
acts, in the case of the children of the poor, in a manner so baffling,
so harassing, so contradictory, that the only feelings it induces in the
minds of parents whose lives are passed in incessant toil and incessant
want are exasperation, fear, and resentment.
Some painful cases show the way in which the State, as guardian of its
children, uses its great power merely to punish the parent and not
to protect the child. Where either father or mother is convicted and
sentenced for cruelty, the child is often left helpless in the hands of
a still more brutalised parent when he or she comes out of gaol. Cases
exist in which a father, sentenced to hard labour for criminal assault on
his own child, can again be given custody of that child on his return to
work at the completion of his sentence. Punishment of the parent may be a
terrible necessity; but the main object of reasoned public action should
be permanently to protect and deliver the child.
A wife may be granted in public court separation from her husband for
cruelty or desertion, with an order that he should pay her a weekly
allowance for the support of the children of the marriage. By spending on
summonses money she can ill afford, she may find it possible to get her
husband sent to prison for non-payment of the allowance. But the court
contents itself with punishing the father, and takes no steps to ensure
the welfare of the children by enforcing payment.
A mother, the bread-winner for three young children, earned 12s. a week
for work which took her from home in the early morning and again in the
evening. During two daily absences, which cost her 2s. weekly in fares,
she was obliged to leave her baby lying in its perambulator. The illness
of an elder child brought an education officer to investigate his absence
from school. The officer discovered the boy in bed with rheumatic fever,
and the baby unattended. Meeting the hurrying mother as she came back
from her morning’s work, he indignantly informed her that it was against
the law to leave a baby as hers had been left. She must in future pay
a neighbour to care for it in her daily absences, or the police would
interfere. She pleaded with him; in her ignorance of the ideals and
methods of our English law, she explained her circumstances. He was, of
course, sorry about it, but the upshot of their conversation was that by
the direct action of Public Authority the mother was forced to pay a
neighbour to care for the baby, and the 10s. a week on which four persons
were living was further diminished. Such a woman may be potentially a
good parent had she any means by which she could make her good parenthood
effective. But her experience of State guardianship of her children
may be that Public Authority, without troubling as to whether or not
fulfilment be in her power, forces further duties and responsibilities
on to her shoulders in respect of those children—through the threatened
medium of the police, with all the horrors of prison in the background.
Suppose the State, as co-guardian of the child, stripped off, when
dealing with parents, the uniform of a police-constable with a warrant
in his pocket. Suppose it approached them in some such spirit as
that displayed by the Public Trustee when dealing with testators and
executors. He offers advice, security, a free hand in carrying out any
legal purpose, and he acts with or without other executors, as the case
may require. Why should not the nation place all the information, all the
security, all the help at its command at the service of its co-guardians,
the fathers and mothers? Why should it not act frankly with them in the
national interest, and help them to see that the needs of the child are
supplied?
The final responsibility for the child’s welfare, the paramount authority
in securing it, belong to the State. Why not recognise the national
responsibility by the definite appointment of a public Guardian who would
enter upon the relation of co-guardian with the parents of every child at
the registration of its birth?
Even now fundamental parental obligations are supposed to be the same
in all classes, but the well-to-do can fulfil them after a fashion
without the assistance of the State, though often with much insecurity
and strain. Were there a department of Public Guardianship upon which
every parent might rely for counsel and effective help, very many whose
difficulty is not the actual housing and feeding of their children would
be only too glad to take advantage of its advice. And even amongst the
well-to-do, fathers and mothers die or lose their faculties, or are
unfit, and the nation’s children are the sufferers.
The appointment of a Public Guardian to cooperate with parents in all
ranks of society is the only effective method, not only of preventing
the national disgrace of “waste children,” but of doing away with the
hardships, the distrusts, the fears and the resentments caused amongst
the workers by the present harsh and ill-defined exercise of national
Guardianship.
It is to the collective interest of a nation that its children should
flourish. They are the future nation. To them the State will be
entrusted. To them the work, the duty, the scheme of things will be
handed on. Suppose children were recognised to be more important than
wealth—suppose they were really put first—what machinery have we which
already deals with their lives, their health, and their comfort? We have
a national system of education which we propose to extend and elaborate,
and to which we have recently attached medical inspection, and we have
the time-honoured machinery of the home. The children of the poor pass
their lives within the limits of these two institutions, and behind
both stands the State, which entirely regulates one and is constantly
modifying the other.
To equip the home for the vital responsibility committed to its care,
the new administrative agency must have the power to go further than
the offering of advice and information to its fellow-guardians, the
parents. It must endow every child who needs it with a grant sufficient
to secure it a minimum of health and comfort. Maintenance grants from the
State are no new thing. Inadequate grants are now made to the parents
of free scholars in secondary schools. What is wanted is the extension
and development of the idea. Based on the need of the child and limited
thereby, the grant would not become a weapon to keep down wages. Men and
women whose children are secure are free to combine, to strike, to take
risks. Men and women who have the entire burden of a family on their
shoulders are not really free to do so.
The State’s guarantee of the necessaries of life to every child could
be fulfilled through various channels—some of them, as the feeding of
school-children, already in existence. This is no suggestion for class
differentiation. The scholars on the foundation of many of the great
public schools, such as Eton and Winchester, are fed, as well as housed
and educated, from the funds of old endowments. National school feeding,
endowed from national wealth, would be an enlargement and amalgamation of
systems already in being. There should be no such thing as an underfed
school child: an underfed child is a disgrace and a danger to the State.
The medical inspection of school-children, extended to children of all
classes, should lead to a universal system of school clinics, where
the children would not only be examined, but treated. Baby clinics
should be within the reach of every mother, and should be centres where
doctors and nurses, at intervals to be dictated by them, would weigh
and examine every child born within their district. At this moment any
weighing centre, school for mothers, or baby clinic which does exist is
fighting the results of bad housing, insufficient food, and miserable
clothing—evils which no medical treatment can cure. Such evils would be
put an end to by the State grant.
Nor would an intolerable system of inspection be necessary in order to
see that the co-trustees of the State—the parents—should faithfully
perform their part of the great work they are undertaking. At every baby
clinic the compulsory attendances of a well-dressed, well-nourished,
well-cared-for child would be marked as satisfactory. No inspection
needed. An unsatisfactory child would perhaps be obliged to attend more
often, or its condition might require the help and guidance of a health
visitor in the home. In this way a merely less efficient home would
easily be distinguished from one which was impossible. The somewhat
inefficient home might be helped, improved, and kept together, while, if
the home conditions were hopelessly bad, the public guardian would in the
last resort exercise its power of making fresh provision for the ward of
the nation in some better home.
As things now are, we have machinery by which the State in its capacity
of co-guardian coerces the parents and urges on them duties which,
unaided, they cannot perform. Parents are to feed, clothe, and house
their children decently, or they can be dealt with by law. But when,
as a matter of fact, it is publicly demonstrated that millions of
parents cannot do this, and that the children are neither fed, clothed,
nor housed decently, the State, which is guardian-in-chief, finds it
convenient to look the other way, shirking its own responsibility, but
falling foul, in special instances, of parents who have failed to comply
with the law.
The law which is supposed to exist for the purpose of protecting
children, seems to exist for the purpose of punishing parents, while
doing nothing, or next to nothing, for the children. The idea still
prevails among some care committees and school authorities that a “bad”
parent must not be “encouraged” by feeding his children at school, and
cases are known to exist where, in order to punish the parent, a hungry
child is not fed. The one mistake an authority which considered the
children first would not make would be that of punishing the child to
spite the parent. Between Boards of Guardians, Care Committees, School
Authorities, and Police, parents who are poor are baffled and puzzled and
disheartened. It would be well for them to have a central authority whose
first thought was the real welfare of the children of the State, and who
blamed and punished parents only when it was clear that they deserved
blame and punishment. That would be real, not false, “relief” of the poor.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
End of Project Gutenberg's Round about a Pound a Week, by Maud Pember Reeves