"ONLY A PAUPER."
[Sidenote: 1832--The poor-law system]
The spirit of reform was impelling Lord Grey's Government in other
directions as well as in those which led to the abolition of slavery in
the Colonies, the improved conditions of the factory works and the
introduction of some better method for the collecting of tithes. The
state of the poor laws all over the country had long been attracting the
attention of thoughtful, philanthropic, and at the same time practical
men. The administration of relief to the poor was still conducted, up to
Lord Grey's reforming Administration, on the same general principle as
that which had been embodied in the famous statute of Queen Elizabeth.
The manner in which that principle had been working during the
intervening centuries was only another illustration of Burke's maxim
about systems founded on the heroic virtues to which we have lately made
reference in this volume. The statute of Elizabeth was based on the
principle that the State, or at least the local authorities, ought to
find relief for all the deserving poor. The duty of making provision for
the deserving poor was left in the hands of those who managed the affairs
of the parishes, of whom the local clergy and magistrates were the
principal personages. The means had to be furnished by the taxpayers,
and the influential men of each parish were left to decide as to the
claims and the deserts of the applicants. There was no regular body
answerable to public opinion, nor was there indeed any practical way in
which the public of a district could very effectively express itself.
Nothing could be better arranged for the development of that benevolent
spirit which Sydney Smith describes as common to all humanity, and {222}
under the influence of which no sooner does A hear that B is in distress
than he thinks C ought at once to relieve him. Men and women had only to
go and say that they were in distress, and some influential persons in
the neighborhood were sure to find that the easiest way of doing a
benevolent act was to provide them with orders for parochial relief
inside or outside the workhouse. There seemed to be a sort of easy-going
impression prevailing everywhere that when a man or a woman or a family
had once been set down for relief from the rates the enrolment ought to
endure as a kind of property for life, and even as an inheritance for
future generations. The grant of parish relief under the old ways has
been humorously likened to a State pension, which, when it has once been
given, is never supposed to be revoked during the lifetime of the
privileged pensioner. But the presumption in the case of those relieved
by the parish had a still more abiding efficacy, for it was assumed that
if a man got parish relief for himself and his family the beneficent
endowment was to pass onward from generation to generation. It is quite
certain that whole races of paupers began to grow up in the country, one
family depending on the rates engendering another family, who were
likewise to be dependent on the rates. Thus the vice of lazy and
shiftless poverty was bequeathed from pauper sire to son. In the case of
the ordinary man or woman there was no incitement to industry and
perseverance. The idle pauper would be fed in any case, and no matter
how hard he worked at the ordinary labor within his reach he could only
hope to be poorly fed. Indeed, even the man who had an honest
inclination for honest labor was very much in the condition of the Irish
cottier tenant, described many years afterwards by John Stuart Mill as
one who could neither benefit by his industry nor suffer by his
improvidence.
[Sidenote: 1832--Some defects in the poor-law system]
The system may be said without exaggeration to have put a positive
premium on immorality among the poorer class of women in a district, for
an unmarried girl who had pauper offspring to show was sure to receive
the liberal benefit of parochial relief. Pity was easily aroused for
{223} her youth, her fall, her deserted condition when her lover or
betrayer had taken himself off to some other district. Any tale of
deceived innocence was readily believed, and so far as physical comforts
go the unmarried mother was generally better off than the poor toiling
and virtuous wife of the hard-worked laborer who found her family growing
and her husband's wages without any increase. Then, of course, there was
all manner of jobbery, and a certain kind of corruption among parish
officials and the local tradesmen and employers of labor generally, which
grew to be an almost recognized incident of the local institutions.
Labor could be got on cheaper terms than the ordinary market rates if the
employers could have men or women at certain seasons of the year whom the
parish was willing to maintain in idleness for the rest of the time.
Small contracts of all kinds were commonly made, in this sort of fashion,
between parish officials and local employers, and the whole system of
relief seemed to become converted into a corrupting influence, pervading
the social life and showing its effects in idleness, immorality, and an
infectious disease of pauperism. Owing to the many misinterpretations of
the laws of settlement it was often easy for a rich and populous district
to fling much of its floating pauperism on some poorer region, and thus
it frequently happened that the more poverty-stricken the parish the
greater was the proportion of unsettled pauperism for which it had to
provide. In many districts the poorer classes of ratepayers were
scarcely a degree better off than the actual paupers whom they were taxed
to support. Thus many a struggling family became pauperized in the end
because of the increase in the rates which the head of the family could
no longer pay, and the exhausted breadwinner, having done his best to
keep himself and his family independent, had at last to eat the bread of
idleness from parish relief, or to starve with his family by the
road-side.
Things had come to such a pass indeed that many earnest and capable
observers, like Lord Brougham, Mr. Nassau Senior, and Miss Martineau,
were beginning to advocate the doctrine that no remedy could be found for
{224} the system of legalized poor relief short of its total abolition.
It was gravely contended by many reformers, whose guiding spirit was pure
love of humanity, that the best course for the Government to take would
be to abolish the poor-relief system altogether, and leave the really
deserving poor to the mercy of private benevolence. By such a measure,
it was contended, private charity would be left to find out its own, and
would, before long, find out its own, and the charity thus given would
carry with it no demoralizing effect, but would be bestowed, as all true
charity is bestowed, with the object of enabling those whom it helped to
help themselves after a while. The owner of an estate, it was argued,
can easily find out where there is genuine distress among those who
depend upon him, and can sustain them through their time of need, so that
when their hour of sickness or enforced idleness is over they may be able
to begin again with renewed energy, and work with the honest purpose of
making themselves independent. It was urged that the operation of the
legalized poor law relief could only create new pauperism wherever its
unwholesome touch was felt. It would impress on the well-inclined and
the industrious the futility of honest and persevering endeavor, inasmuch
as idleness could get itself better cared for than laborious poverty.
Idleness and immorality, it was argued, were well housed and fed, while
honest independence and virtue were left outside in cold and hunger.
[Sidenote: 1832-33--A commission on poor-law relief]
The study of political economy was even already beginning to be a part of
the education of most men who took any guiding place or even any
observant interest in the national life. Writers who dealt with such
subjects were beginning to find readers among the general public. Some
of the members of Lord Grey's own Administration had taken a close
interest in such questions. The whole subject of poor relief and its
distribution was one of the earliest which came under the consideration
of the Liberal Government after the passing of the Reform Bill. It was
clear that something would soon have to be done, and, as the Whig
ministers had a good deal of other work on their {225} hands, the natural
course, at such a time, was to appoint a commission which should inquire
into the whole system of poor-law relief, and report to the Government as
to the best means for its reorganization. Such a commission was
appointed and set at once to its work. Among the commissioners and the
assistant-commissioners nominated for the purpose were some men whose
names are well remembered in our own days. One of those was Mr. Nassau
Senior, a man of great ability and wide practical information, who
distinguished himself in many other fields of literary work, as well as
that which belonged to what may be called the literature of pure
economics. Another was Mr. Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Chadwick, who
was a living and an active presence, until a very short time ago, among
those who devoted themselves to the study and the propagation of what are
called social science principles, and whose work was highly valued by so
well qualified a critic as John Stuart Mill. The commission made careful
inquiry into the operation of the poor-law relief system, and presented a
report which marked an epoch in our social history, and might well have a
deep interest even for the casual student of to-day. The result of the
inquiries made was such as to satisfy the commissioners that the
administration of the poor law had increased the evils of pauperism,
wherever it found them already in existence, and had created and fostered
evils of the same kind, even in regions which had not known them before
they were touched by its contagion. The report of the commissioners
pronounced that the existing system of poor law was "destructive to the
industry and honesty and forethought of the laborers, to the wealth and
morality of the employers of labor and the owners of property, and to the
mutual good-will and happiness of all." This may be thought a very
sweeping condemnation, but the more closely the evidence is studied the
more clearly it will be seen that where the poor-relief system had any
effect worth taking into calculation this was the sort of effect it
produced. The real objects of the legalized poor-law relief system were
well and even liberally described in the report of the {226}
commissioners. The object of poor relief, as the commissioners defined
it, should be to make provision for that proportion, to be found in
almost every community, which is plunged into such a condition of
distress that it never can hope to be self-supporting again, and for that
more fluctuating proportion made up of those who at the time are unable
to support themselves, but whom some temporary relief may enable to
return to their former condition of independence. In each class of cases
it ought to be made equally clear, before public relief were called in,
that those in distress, continuous or temporary, had no near relatives in
a condition to afford them reasonable assistance without undue sacrifice.
Of course it was understood that these conditions included the men and
women who, owing to some temporary lack of employment, were actually
unable to find the means of living by their own honest labor. The ideas
of the commissioners were not pedantically economical in their range, nor
did they insist that public relief must be given only as the reward of
personal integrity when visited by undeserved misfortune. It was freely
admitted that even where men and women had allowed themselves, by
idleness or carelessness, to sink into actual poverty, it was better to
give them temporary relief at the public expense than allow them to take
up with the ways of crime, or leave them to pay the penalty of their
wrongdoings by death from starvation. But it was strictly laid down that
a healthy system of public relief was to help men and women for a time,
in order that they might be able to help themselves once again, as soon
as possible, and to make provision for those who had done their work and
could do no more, and who had no near relatives in a condition to keep
them from starvation. The report of the commissioners pointed out that
the existing system "collects and chains down the laborers in masses,
without any reference to the demand for their labor; that, while it
increases their numbers, it impairs the means by which the fund for their
subsistence is to be reproduced, and impairs the motives for using those
means which it suffers to exist; and that every year and every day these
evils are becoming {227} more overwhelming in magnitude and less
susceptible of cure."
[Sidenote: 1833--Plans to improve the relief system]
The passages which we have quoted are taken from the recommendations of
Mr. Chadwick. He goes on to say that, "of those evils, that which
consists merely in the amount of the rates--an evil great when considered
by itself, but trifling when compared with the moral effects which I am
deploring--might be much diminished by the combination of workhouses, and
by substituting a rigid administration and contract management for the
existing scenes of neglect, extravagance, jobbery, and fraud." Mr.
Chadwick points out that "if no relief were allowed to be given to the
able-bodied or to their families, except in return for adequate labor or
in a well-regulated workhouse, the worst of the existing sources of
evil--the allowance system--would immediately disappear; a broad line
would be drawn between the independent laborers and the paupers; the
numbers of paupers would be immediately diminished, in consequence of the
reluctance to accept relief on such terms, and would be still further
diminished in consequence of the increased fund for the payment of wages
occasioned by the diminution of rates; and would ultimately, instead of
forming a constantly increasing proportion of our whole population,
become a small, well-defined part of it, capable of being provided for at
an expense less than one-half of the present poor rates." And finally it
was urged that "it is essential to every one of these improvements that
the administration of the poor laws should be intrusted, as to their
general superintendence, to one central authority with extensive powers;
and, as to their details, to paid officers, acting under the
consciousness of constant superintendence and strict responsibility." On
these reports and recommendations the new measure for the reorganization
of the poor-law system was founded. The main objects of the measure were
to divide these countries, for poor-relief purposes, into areas of
regular and, in a certain sense, of equal proportions, so that the whole
burden of poverty should not be cast for relief on one particular
district, while a neighboring and much richer {228} district was able to
escape from its fair measure of liability; to have the relief
administered not by local justices, or parish clergymen, but by
representative bodies duly elected and responsible to public opinion; and
by the creation of one great central board charged with the duty of
seeing to the proper administration of the whole system. Thus, it will
be observed that the main principle of the Reform Bill, the principle of
representation, had been already accepted by statesmanship as the central
idea of a department of State which had nothing to do with the struggles
of political parties.
[Sidenote: 1834--Passage of the Poor-law Bill]
The measure when it came before Parliament met, of course, with strong
opposition, first in the House of Commons and then in the House of Lords.
Much of the opposition came, no doubt, from men of old-fashioned ways,
who dreaded and hated any changes in any institutions to which they had
been accustomed, and who held that even pauperism itself acquired a
certain sanctity from the fact that it had been fostered and encouraged
by the wisdom of so many succeeding generations. Some of the opposition,
however, was inspired by feelings of a more purely sentimental, and
therefore perhaps of a more respectable order. It was urged that the new
system, if carried into law, would bear hardly on the deserving as well
as the undeserving people; that the workhouse test would separate the
husband from wife, and the father from the children; and, above all, that
certain clauses of the new measure would leave the once innocent girl who
had been led astray by some vile tempter to bear the whole legal
responsibility as well as the public shame of her sin. It is not
necessary for us now to go over at any length the long arguments which
were brought up on both sides of the controversy. Many capable and
high-minded observers were carried away by what may be called the
sentimental side of the question, and forgot the enormous extent of the
almost national corruption which the measure was striving to remove, in
their repugnance to some of the evils which it did not indeed create, but
which it failed to abolish. One weakness common to nearly all the
arguments employed against the {229} measure came from the facility there
was for putting out of sight altogether, during such a process of
reasoning, the fact that the daily and hourly effect of the existing
system was to force the deserving and hard-working poor to sink into that
very pauperism which it was the object of all law-makers to diminish, or
to abolish altogether. The wit of man could not devise any system of
poor relief which should never go wrong in its application, should never
bear harshly on men and women who deserved, and were striving for, an
honest and independent subsistence.
The Bill, however, was passed in the House of Commons by a large
majority. It was carried after a hard fight through the House of Lords,
and received the royal assent in August, 1834. It should be said that
the Duke of Wellington, although usually strong and resolute as a party
man, had good sense and fair spirit enough to make him a warm supporter
of the measure, despite the vehement protestations of many of his own
habitual supporters. Since that time it seems to be admitted by common
consent that the measure has accomplished all the beneficial results
which its promoters anticipated from it, and has, in many of its
provisions, worked even better than some of its supporters had expected.
Of course, our poor-law system has since that time been always undergoing
modifications of one kind or another, and public criticism is continually
pointing to the necessity for further improvement. We hear every now and
then of cases in which, owing to local maladministration, some deserving
men and women, honestly struggling to keep their heads above pauperism,
are left to perish of hunger or cold. We read well-authenticated, only
too well-authenticated, instances of actual starvation taking place in
some wealthy district of a great city. We hear of parochial funds
squandered and muddled away; of the ratepayers' money wasted in
extravagance, and worse than extravagance; of miserable courts and alleys
where the deserving and undeserving poor are alike neglected and uncared
for. But it would be utterly impossible that some such defects as these
should not be found in the management of any system worked by {230} human
mechanism for such a purpose as the relief of a great nation's poverty.
The predominant fact is that we have a system which is based on the
representative principle, which is open to the inspection and the
criticism of the whole country, and which frankly declares itself the
enemy of professional beggary and the helper of the poverty which is
honestly striving to help itself. Much remains yet to be done for the
improvement of our national system of poor relief, but it has, at least,
to be said that the reformed Parliament did actually establish a system
founded on just principles and responsible to public judgment.
[Sidenote: 1833--The East India Company's charter]
Another of the great reforms which was accomplished in this age of reform
found its occasion when the time came for the renewal of the East India
Company's charter. The Government and the Houses of Parliament had to
deal with the future administration of one of the greatest empires the
world had ever seen, brought together by events and forces the like of
which had not been at work in any previous chapter of the world's
history. We have already traced, in this book, the growth of the East
India Company's possessions, a growth brought about by a combination of
the qualities which belonged to the Alexanders and the Caesars, and of
the qualities also which go to the expansion of peaceful commerce and the
opening up of markets for purely industrial enterprise. The charter of
the Company had been renewed by legislation at long intervals, and the
first reformed Parliament now found itself compelled to settle the
conditions under which the charter should be renewed for another period
of twenty years. Mr. Molesworth justly remarks that "it was a fortunate
circumstance that the Reform Bill had passed, and a Reform Parliament
been elected, before the question of the renewal of the Company's charter
was decided; for otherwise the directors of this great Company and other
persons interested in the maintenance of the monopolies and abuses
connected with it would in all probability have returned to Parliament,
by means of rotten boroughs, a party of adherents sufficiently large to
have effectually prevented the Government and the House of Commons from
dealing with {231} this great question in the manner in which the
interests of England and India alike demanded that it should be dealt
with."
Up to the time at which we have now arrived the East India Company had an
almost absolute monopoly of the whole Chinese trade, as well as the
Indian trade, and a control over the administration of India such as
might well have gratified the ambition of a despotic monarch. The last
renewal of the Company's charter had been in 1813, and it was to run for
twenty years, so that Lord Grey's Government found themselves charged
with the task of making arrangements for its continuance, or its
modifications, or its abolition. Some distinction had already been
effected between the powers of the Company as the ruler of a vast Empire
under the suzerainty of England, and its powers as a huge commercial
corporation, or what we should now call a syndicate, but the company
still retained its monopoly of the India and China trade. In the mean
time, however, the principles of political economy had been asserting a
growing influence over the public intelligence, and the question was
coming to be asked, more and more earnestly, why a private company should
be allowed the exclusive right of conducting the trade between England
and India and China. An agitation against the monopoly began, as was but
natural, among the great manufacturing and commercial towns in the North
of England. Miss Martineau, in her "History of the Thirty Years' Peace,"
ascribes the beginning of this movement to a once well-known merchant and
philanthropist of Liverpool, the late Mr. William Rathbone, whom some of
us can still remember having known in our earlier years. Miss Martineau
had probably good reasons for making such a statement, and, at all
events, nothing is more likely than that such a movement began in
Liverpool, and began with such a man. In London the directors and
supporters of the East India Company were too powerful to give much
chance to a hostile movement begun in the metropolis, and it needed the
energy, the commercial independence, and the advanced opinions of the
northern cities to give it an effective start.
{232}
When the time came for the renewal of the Company's charter, the
Government had made up their mind that the renewal should be conditional
on the abolition of the commercial monopoly, and that the trade between
the dominions of King William and the Eastern populations should be
thrown open to all the King's subjects. The measure passed through both
Houses of Parliament with but little opposition. Mr. Molesworth is
perfectly right in his remarks as to the different sort of reception
which would have been given to such a measure if the charter had come up
for renewal before the Act of Reform had abolished the nomination
boroughs and the various other sham constituencies. But it is a striking
proof of the hold which the representative principle and the doctrines of
free-trade were already beginning to have on public opinion that the
monopoly of the East India Company should not have been able to make a
harder fight for its existence. The wonder which a modern reader will be
likely to feel as he studies the subject now is, not that the monopoly
should have been abolished with so little trouble, but that rational men
should have admitted so long the possibility of any justification for its
existence.
The renewal of the Charter of the Bank of England gave an opportunity,
during the same session, for an alteration in the conditions under which
the Bank maintains its legalized position and its relations with the
State, and for a further reorganization of those conditions, which was in
itself a distinct advance in the commercial arrangements of the Empire.
Other modifications have taken place from time to time since those days,
and it is enough to say here that the alterations made by the first
reformed Parliament, at the impulse of Lord Grey and his colleagues, were
in keeping with the movement of the commercial spirit and went along the
path illumined by the growing light of a sound political economy.
{233}