To amplify my statement I will say--and in a moment I will endeavour
to prove--that if the idle, vicious, hopeless and sullen scoundrels
who act as a drag upon the wheel of the Commonwealth, who have been
allowed too long to clog social progress, were removed, the whole
problem would be solved.
I beg you to listen carefully to me while I tell you how the
_Unemployables_ have created the problem of the Unemployed, how they
are throttling charitable enterprise, how they are making economic
methods of relief impossible, how they are destroying the present and
the future of the honest working man. Who are the people I have called
“The Unemployables”? What is _their_ idea of work and what is the
_real ideal_ of work? I will answer these questions. I will show you
who and what the Unemployables are. I will contrast their attitude
towards honest toil with the attitude of honest men towards toil, and
when I have done this I will try to explain how these people are
injuring you and me, what a terrible burden they are upon our backs.
The month before my story dealing with the Unemployed appeared in the
_Daily Mail_, a series of articles on the same subject was published.
In some of them the Unemployables were painted with perfect fidelity
and vividness. I take some paragraphs here and there to make a
connected picture.
“Half-past eleven on Friday morning in a back street in the most
poverty-stricken and most largely relieved district in Canning Town. A
group of women wait around the gates of a chapel, from which doles are
being issued. Dirty, ragged and untidy, they certainly are, but
hunger-stricken--No! Their children playing in the roadway near by are
ill-clad, filthy, and in many cases bare-footed, and do show signs of
under-feeding, but not the mothers.
These are the wives of the habitual Unemployed seeking relief.
The curious stranger notices that some of the women go from the relief
station to the public-houses. Let us look inside a few of these
establishments. In a side bar of the first place we enter, we find
eleven women, exactly of the same type as those soliciting charity
without. One of them carries a recently-born baby in her arms, and
another has a little girl two years old clinging to her apron. Each
woman has a glass in front of her. Some of them have been here since
half-past nine in the morning, and will stay for hours yet. In the
next drinking shop is a party of nine, in the next but two, while in
the last of all we find seven. Now one rises to go out, for her hour
has come to beg for aid from school or parson or Unemployed fund.
An hour later we can see the husbands of these women amusing
themselves at the street corner higher up. Five bookmakers’ touts are
busy among them at one cross roads alone.
At this time, when we are threatened with a new Unemployed agitation,
it is as well that the causes of much of the distress in some of the
Unemployed areas should be understood. For several years the public
has tried to deal with the sufferings of the very poor by sentimental
means. Each winter has brought increase of relief, and each increase
of relief has helped to render more permanent the problem it has set
about to cure.
We have now in one district alone, a large number of people, totalling
many thousands, incapable of regular work and unwilling to attempt it.
They have been taught to lean on charity to aid them, and they have
proved themselves apt pupils. Their homes will, as a rule, for sheer
uncleanliness, bear comparison with the dwelling of an Australian
aborigine. Their children are systematically made untidy, and are
given a neglected air in order more successfully to extort outside
aid. Parental love is so dead that, in very many cases, the mothers
will sell the boots given to their children in order to buy gin.
This is no vague, general charge. Three years ago the readers of the
_Daily Mail_ entrusted the writer with a sum of money to spend on
meals and shoes for needy children in this district. Teachers from
many schools assured me that such effort would be wasted. ‘Buy the
shoes and give them to the children to-day,’ they said; ‘and to-morrow
the shoes will be in the pawnshops, and the mothers will have drunk
the proceeds.’ It was necessary for us to construct a careful system
of guard checks to save the children from their own mothers.
Last year four separate general funds were distributing doles and aid
among these people in one district. A fund for the children, the best
of all, kept them from starvation. Two outside agencies collected many
thousands of pounds and scattered them about. The West Ham Corporation
spent over £26,000 on relief works. What has been the result? The
first outcome was to draw to this district many of the loafers from
other parts, who saw the chance to obtain something for nothing. The
more money that came, the more the number of Unemployed grew.
There is, without question, an amount of perfectly genuine distress,
distress that should be relieved. But it is not, as a rule, found in
the ‘Unemployed’ processions. The men who are making the most noise
could not work properly if they would, and would not if they could.
This is a hard saying. Some facts may help to prove it. Many employers
of labour around the docks agree in testifying that their difficulty
is to induce casual men to remain long at their work. A man will take
on a job for a couple of hours, and then ask for his 1_s._ 2_d._
(7_d._ an hour) and go. ‘Look here, guv’nor, I’ve had enough of this,’
he exclaims, with perfect truthfulness. He has secured enough to see
him through the day--why should he trouble after more?
The labourer of the casual loafing type who works for two days a week
thinks that he has done all his duty. His work is worth comparatively
little when it is done. The municipal relief work at West Ham last
winter spent £14,000 on material and £12,000 on labour. On the most
liberal estimate, the labour value obtained was worth not more than
£4500, and the tasks would have been done by any contractor for that
amount. Many whose names were down on the Unemployed Register refused
work when offered to them.
Last winter the workhouse authorities began to distribute relief on a
more liberal scale. A number of distressed cases were taken in without
labour. The number increased until it reached 473. Then the guardians
resolved to re-establish the labour test, and to make the applicants
do some work for the aid they had. The numbers at once fell to 119.
The people have been taught to look upon the outside public as a milch
cow, and the guardians and municipal authorities as officials from
whom everything possible is to be extorted. The members of an
‘unofficial’ relief committee invited me last week to one of their
meetings. A bloated woman came asking them for aid. They gave her a
small dole, with repeated injunctions that she was to lie to the
relieving officer if he asked her if she had had anything. ‘Take care
that your fire is out and your cupboard is bare when the relieving
officer comes,’ one member added.
Here, then, is the problem to be solved. A great army of habitual
loafers and incapables live off the woes of the genuine Unemployed.
The latter, too, often suffer in silence. The spongers, hardened by
long experience, adepts in every trick to impress a generous public,
ply their calling more boldly each year.
Such are the men who will not work--the ‘work-shy’ men, the
‘bone-idle’ men, the ‘wasters,’ the scoundrels who turn the holy
virtue of charity into a foolishness, and who recruit the ranks of
those who keep society in a state of siege.
These people form the majority of the Unemployables. Please remember
that I am not talking of the _Unemployed_, but of the Unemployables.
The men who won’t work form the majority, but the hopeless herd of
Unemployables is also swelled by those who _can’t_ work. They can’t
work because their life has never taught them how to work. From
infancy they have been trained to depend upon charity, from childhood
they have been denied an education which will enable them to earn a
living.
Their very birth has been charitably conducted. The parish doctor has
given free aid, the blankets have come from a local fund, and probably
there has been a Salvation lass scrubbing the room for the mother.
From infancy they are accustomed to look to charity for their very
comfort. A boots fund supplies them with shoes, free meals are their
main sustenance, and if they are very fortunate a holiday fund gives
them a week in the country. Their first lessons are in begging, and
they are taught to lie and to cringe to the givers of doles.
When such children leave their slum schools, what awaits them? There
is little or no possibility of the slum boy learning a trade, while
the girl finds it impossible, even if she desires, to learn
housewifery by going to service. The factory awaits the girl, and odd
jobs, as potboy, errand boy, runner for bookmakers, or the like, await
the lad. At seventeen or so the youth becomes a man, and applies for
casual labour at the docks or elsewhere. About the same time he mates
with a girl who has been working at the factory.
By this time he has forgotten nearly all he learned at school. What
can reasonably be expected of him?
It is impossible to condemn this second class of Unemployable. If you
and I had been brought up in the same way, we should live as they do
and behave as they do, in all probability. If a child has seen his
father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, his uncles, aunts
and all the friends of the family habitually go to bed in their boots,
he will sleep in his boots too. If he lives in a village where every
one goes to bed in boots, and has never been out of that village nor
witnessed the customs of any other village, who is to tell him that
sleeping in boots is an unpleasant trick which spoils the sheets? A
stranger who came upon a child of this village and told him that he
was a dirty little boy who ought to be punished, would be an idiot who
understood nothing of the power of environment, the truth of education
or the facts of life.
But the first, and largest, class of Unemployables who have worked,
can work, know how to work, but _won’t_ work, is in a very different
case, and is formed of very different people.
These are the men who are lost.
For my own part, I believe that idleness is the greatest of all sins,
the chief of all crimes. It is not those offences against the law of
God and the ordinance of man that we punish which are always the
worst. I may be wrong, but I give it as my opinion that sloth is the
prime sin of all those lusts and iniquities that war against the soul
and destroy manhood. I believe that the thief who works, the drunkard
who works, the liar who works, the adulterer who works, may often be a
better man than the boneless, bloodless idler who is neither thief,
drunkard, liar, or adulterer.
Work--all work--has in it a fine spiritual element, just as the
smallest and meanest thing in the world has a divine side, inasmuch as
God made it and saw that it was good. All temporary forms, it has been
said, include essences that are eternal. Whatever be the meanness and
loneliness of a man’s occupation, he may discharge it on principles
common to himself and the Archangel Gabriel. The man who spends his
whole life in cleaning codfish in Leadenhall Market is a better and
finer man in the eye of God, a worthier and more valuable man to the
Commonwealth, than the poor man who loafs away his life in a four-ale
bar, or the rich one who lounges through his existence in a palace.
However far I may go in my belief that idleness is the greatest vice
of all, hardly any one here would attempt to combat the general view
that it is a vice and a very bad one.
But leaving the purely moral standpoint for a moment, let me point out
to you the value of work as an aid to _material_ success and
happiness.
For a moment we will put aside the fact that toil is a virtue and
laziness a sin. Let me briefly repeat what has been said a thousand
times by far abler and more important lips than mine--
Work pays.
In the spring of this year I was staying in the South of France with
a friend who is a great employer of labour. He employs nearly 16,000
men. He told me that, quite unknown to every one, he has established a
system of reports upon the work and ability of each separate man. His
agents inform him that Jack Smith, whom he has never met and will
never meet in this world, is a hard worker. The next promotion goes to
Jack Smith.
Genius, the highest and rarest attribute of the human being, has been
said to be “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” A capacity for
work which is not infinite but finite, yet which is still strong and
vigorous, ought always and in all circumstances to secure a livelihood
and ensure respect. This is the very least that it should do. It may
do much more. It may command success.
What was it but work that enabled Heyne of Gottingen, the son of a
poor weaver, to become one of the greatest classical scholars; that
enabled Akenside, the son of a butcher, to write _The Pleasures of the
Imagination_; Arkwright, the barber, to become Sir Richard Arkwright,
inventor of the spinning-jenny; Beattie, the school-master, to become
Professor of Moral Philosophy; Prideaux to become the Bishop of
Winchester from being the assistant in the kitchen at Exeter College;
Edmund Saunders, the errand lad, to become Sir Edmund Saunders, Chief
Justice of the King’s Bench; Jonson, the common bricklayer, to become
Ben Jonson the famous? Adrian VI. rose to his great fame as a scholar
from being a poor lad in the streets, who, for want of other
convenience, had to read by the lamps in the church porches; Parkes,
the grocer’s, and Davy, the apothecary’s apprentice, became the two
greatest chemical investigators of their age. What enabled Dr. Isaac
Milner, Dean of Carlisle and Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, to
rise from the humble position of a weaver; and White, who was also a
weaver, to become Professor of Arabic at Oxford; Hunter, the
cabinet-maker, to attain the first rank among anatomists? Incredible
labour enabled Demosthenes to become the greatest orator of antiquity.
_The Economy of Human Life_ and _The Annual Register_ were the
production of Dodsley, who by labour raised himself from the position
of a weaver and a footman. Labour enabled Falconer, the barber’s son,
to write his celebrated poem of _The Shipwreck_. The editor of _The
Quarterly Review_, Gifford, somehow acquired the needed capability
from being a cabin-boy and shoemaker’s apprentice. Haydn, the son of a
poor cartwright, became the eminent composer; Johnson, through
sickness and poverty, rose to be the immortal linguist; Jeremy
Taylor, a barber’s son, ended as theologian and bishop; Barry, from a
working mason, became the renowned painter. Dr. Livingstone attained
his celebrity from being a “piecer” in a factory. Indeed, if we read
the lives of distinguished men in any department, we find them
celebrated for the amount of labour they could perform. There is no
exception to this rule even in the military profession. Julius Cæsar,
Cromwell, Washington, Napoleon, and Wellington, were all renowned as
hard workers. We read how many days they could support the fatigues of
a march; how many hours they spent in the field, in the cabinet, in
the court; how many secretaries they kept employed; in short, how hard
they worked. Superficial thinkers are ready to cry out, “Miracles!”
Yes! but they are miracles of industry and of labour.
Great success came to these great workers I have enumerated, people
who started life as working men. If they had lived to-day they would
have achieved the same, though the task would have been a more
difficult one. Men of this stamp cannot be crushed. But more ordinary
men who have the capacity for hard work and are willing to do it, what
shall we say of many of them in the year 1906? What shall we say of
the thousands who want work and can’t get it, of the Unemployed?
We must say just this--the Unemployed are the victims of the
Unemployable, and all working men suffer to support the idle and
worthless classes of the community.
Every one suffers, every one has to pay for the maintenance of the
Unemployable. But the working man pays most and suffers most. Let me
put it to the working men here to-night.
Out of every pound I earn I have to pay a shilling to the Government
in income-tax. I call this hard, because every penny of my income is
made by hard mental work. The parson and the doctor, the farmer, the
lawyer, the author, are taxed exactly the same as the man who has not
earned his income, but who has been left land or other property by his
father. I work ten hours a day nearly every day of my life, and I only
make nineteen shillings out of every pound I earn, while the man who
has an income without working for it pays not a penny more. You are
probably wondering what this has to do with your side of the question.
You do not pay income-tax, you may say, it is only the people who make
more than three pounds odd a week who have to pay this tax.
You are quite wrong if you think this. In proportion to your earnings,
you pay, even here in this country, more than I do, more than the
doctor, more than the farmer--more than almost any one, except the
parson, who is always the most heavily taxed man in proportion to his
means and his duties in the community. It is true that you don’t get
yellow papers “On His Majesty’s Service” by the post demanding this or
that sum. You don’t get polite gentlemen calling for money, and backed
up by the whole force of the British Constitution. You pay in other
ways. Take the case of a farm labourer. The farmer rents his land from
the original owner, and he makes as much as he can out of it. The
farmer has to pay the Government a proportion of every shilling he
makes. It stands to reason, therefore, that he can’t afford to pay his
labourers as much as he would were he himself less heavily taxed. And
there are other ways in which the working man pays out of all
proportion to his earnings. The working man who buys a pound of tea, a
glass of beer, or an ounce of tobacco, pays exactly the same duty on
these articles as people with ten times his income. I may buy a pound
of tea at two shillings and the working man may not be able to pay
more than a shilling. But that is merely a question of quality, and
does not affect the argument. The working man with a very small
income pays the same duty as the man with a much larger one.
The working man also pays other taxes, called rates, in his
house-rent. They are not collected direct from him, they are collected
from the landlord, who puts up the rent accordingly.
Therefore, although a superficial view would tend to show that the
working man is without many of those burdens which fall upon the
shoulders of larger earners, such a view would be utterly wrong.
I have still so much to say that I cannot go further into the economic
aspect of the question. Detailed proof, abundant and overflowing,
could be easily supplied. I have no time to do so now, I merely repeat
the indubitable fact that the working man has to pay for the
workhouses, the asylums, and the prisons; poor as he is, he must
support the Unemployables.
In the workhouses, at any rate in the London unions, he must support
them in a comparative luxury which he himself can by no means afford.
In one great workhouse, for example, we find that the finest butter,
the best Irish bacon, the whitest bread, the most expensive cuts of
beef are for the pauper. Outside the workhouse the working head of a
family who is struggling to bring up his children in honourable
independence has none of these luxuries. In place of the best butter,
he and his family have the cheapest margarine or dripping; their
bacon, if they have any, is bought in inferior scraps; their bread is
of common description, and instead of costly cuts of beef, they too
often have to content themselves with the cheapest form of food in
London--fried fish. At no time have they too much of even this food.
Yet, while they are existing in such pinching poverty, fighting their
way from day to day and from hour to hour, an enormous tax is levied
on them in the form of rates, to maintain in unnecessary comfort those
who are living an idle and unprofitable life.
The contrast to the worker must seem poignant. On the one side of the
workhouse gate are poverty and incessant misery, with insufficient
food to eat. On the other side are warmth and light, complete freedom
from care, and abundance of food to eat, with no necessity whatever to
earn the day’s food by labour. All the prizes are to the unfit; all
the effort and misery are to the laborious. If the honourable working
man loses his employment through some change in industrial
organization or through the growth of foreign competition, he finds it
too often impossible to struggle back to his feet. He sees the help
which might have carried him through his misfortune diverted by the
blatant outcries of the worthless. He must be content to suffer and
die in proud silence, while those who have never done or wished to do
an honest day’s work absorb the contributions of public and private
charity.
Mr. McKenzie, to whom I am indebted for so many illuminating facts,
completes the picture in a few vivid paragraphs. He takes the huge and
poverty-stricken London district of Poplar for his text, and he tells
us--
“Had the Poplar poor law authorities contented themselves with
dealing adequately with the old and the sick, and the maimed
who are among them, all their resources would have been taxed,
for the district is now very, very poor. They went further.
They deliberately attracted to themselves the great shifting
army of loafers and of idlers from all parts of London.
“How has this been done? By two means. Outdoor relief has been
freely granted to all kinds of folk, and the people inside the
workhouse have been treated in a sumptuous manner far above the
style of their class.
“The guardians decided that the stone-yard is derogatory, and
abolished the labour test. They had no sufficient labour for
men, so they allow them to remain in practical idleness. There
are over two hundred and fifty young men in the workhouse
to-day, amply fed, well clothed, and maintained week by week,
and month by month, in idleness. They are lazy,
good-for-nothing scamps, many of them, as their records clearly
show. Naturally they take advantage of the glorious prospect of
plenty to eat and nothing to do. There is another army, only
less numerous, of young women in the prime of years and of
health, equally idle.
“A few days since, I went over the ‘workhouse’ at midday, and
watched the great rooms packed with legal idlers, all busy
eating a dinner such as few labourers outside have. ‘Do you
mean seriously to tell me that these men have no proper
employment?’ I asked my guide, as we stood in a great room
thronged with not far short of three hundred men, mostly
varying in age from eighteen to forty, all sound limbed, all
physically fit. ‘We use them as far as we can in cleaning up,’
my informant replied.
“The next extraordinary point at Poplar is the feeding of the
inmates. No one denies that the pauper should have a
sufficiency of wholesome food, and most of us would willingly
support the generous feeding of the old and the infirm. But the
Poplar guardians have gone to the extreme here. They work on
the policy avowed by some of them that ‘the poor man ought to
have the best sometimes.’ They are going to give him the best
when he is in the workhouse, and they do! The butter costs,
bought by the ton, 1_s._ 2-3/4_d._ a pound. I am informed that
the contractors are required to supply only ‘Denny’s best
Irish’ bacon. The meat is of the very finest quality to be
bought, and the bread is of a grade and perfection rarely to be
had in shops or restaurants. I examined the dinners being
served in the course of an ordinary visit, and I declare in
sober truth that the quality was at least as high as that given
in an average West End club. The mealy potatoes and the fine
boiled meats certainly equal those served in the modest club
where I lunch.”
This, my working-men listeners, is what you and I are paying for. The
obvious result upon any district where the rates must be raised to an
impossible height in order to support the idle and worthless, is that
such a district ceases to be an area of employment.
The great manufacturing firms decline to continue their operations in
a place where local taxation is so heavy that it prevents them from
paying a dividend to their shareholders.
The firms go, but their labourers do not go with them. These, after a
brief struggle, swell the ranks of the Unemployed, that sorrowful army
for which the Government has just voted £200,000 as a small temporary
relief.
Now I do not think that I need say much more as to the manner in which
the Unemployables have created the class of the Unemployed, and as to
how the working man suffers. I have given a brief summary enough--in
the endeavour to be as thorough as possible--but it is already
somewhat lengthy.
I wish to come at once to the principal point of this lecture--_the
remedy for it all_!
I am personally convinced that the remedy I am about to propound is
the only satisfactory one, and the object of my presence here to-night
is to outline it for you.
There is a time in the history of certain diseases when any malignant
growth must be removed with the knife. Cancer, the tiger of all
physical ills, can only be treated in this way. The hideous thing
which has fastened on the human body must be cut away from it, or the
body dies. The gentle measures of medicine and diet are useless. Life
must be preserved by the scalpel and knife of the surgeon. “Is there
no other way, doctor?” the nervous patient asks. “Don’t you think that
I might get well if I kept on the Chian Turpentine treatment or the
injection of Tryptic Ferment?”
The surgeon of to-day who knows his business will answer “No.” He will
proceed to the stern though inevitable operation.
And that is what we have got to do in regard to this social cancer,
this economic disease of the Unemployed question. We must stop the
whole thing. You working men have the power to do it, and this is the
way in which you must do it.
In the first place, you must realize your own power over the councils
of the nation, in the ordering and determining of the laws of England.
You who are working men are already beginning to do this. To take only
one instance, the Trades Unions have already combined to send a number
of labour members to Parliament, and a working man holds a high
ministerial position with conspicuous honesty and ability. I don’t in
the least agree with most of the aims of what is known as the Labour
Party. My reading, education, and experience have taught me that
Socialism is the dream of an impossibility, and that the witness of
history, the experience of nations, and the laws of God are all
hostile to it alike. There has never yet been a continuing
Commonwealth in which all men were equal inasmuch as they were State
officials. There never will be.
But working men have now the power to remedy the unjust conditions
under which they live. The more they realize that power the more able
will they be to bring about the change.
One of the first things that they must do is to relieve themselves
and others of the burden of the Unemployables--this is the way in
which I believe it can be done.
We must follow the plan adopted with signal success by Germany,
Denmark, Belgium, and other foreign countries, only, in proportion as
our own problem is more menacing and acute than in other States, we
must adapt, amplify, and extend their plan to our needs. In these
countries every effort is made to assist the deserving poor, while the
undeserving are not merely repelled; they are also punished. Relief is
given, after a careful visitation of the distressed case and thorough
personal inquiry, in the shape of a loan, and repayment of the loan is
required except in cases where the assisted are not able-bodied. The
lazy and worthless are relegated to labour colonies, or to penal
workhouses, whence they can return to ordinary life after a term of
labour has been served. The old are cared for, when deserving, in a
different kind of workhouse, and receive indulgent treatment. In this
way sturdiness and independence of character are assured, and there is
no danger of the excessive multiplication of paupers, or of enormous
expenditure on relief.
This is speaking generally. The two chief agencies for dealing with
the Unemployed question are the systems of insurance against
unemployment and the establishment of labour colonies in which the
Unemployables are forced to work.
It is impossible for me to-night to do more than sketch the working of
these two institutions in a single country. I will, therefore, outline
the method of insurance adopted in Germany, and give an account of the
greatest labour colony in existence--that of Merxplas in Belgium.
A month or two ago I was in the great German city of Cologne. There I
found the following system in operation:--
“The ‘City of Cologne Office for Insurance against Unemployment in
Winter’ was established in 1896. The object of the office is to
provide, with the assistance of the Cologne Labour Registry, an
insurance against unemployment during the winter (December to March)
for the benefit of male workpeople in the Cologne district. In order
to insure with the office, a man must be at least eighteen years of
age, must have lived for at least a year in Cologne, and must not
suffer from permanent incapacity to work. He is required to pay a
weekly premium, payment of which must commence as from April 1, and
must continue for thirty-four weeks.
“The amount of the premium was originally 3_d._ per week for both
skilled and unskilled workmen; in 1901 the rate of premium was fixed
at 3_d._ for unskilled and 4-1/4_d._ for skilled men; in 1903 the rate
was raised to 3-1/2_d._ per week for unskilled and 4-3/4_d._ per week
for skilled workmen. In no case must a man be more than four weeks
late in paying his weekly premium, otherwise he loses all claim upon
the office; but in special cases the operation of this rule may be
suspended by the committee of the insured.
“In return for these payments the insured workman, if and when out of
work in the period named above, receives, for not more than eight
weeks in all, a daily amount, which is 2_s._ for each of the first
twenty days (nothing being paid for Sundays), and then 1_s._ on each
subsequent day. These payments begin on the third week-day after the
date on which the man has reported himself as out of work.
“While out of work, a man must report himself to the office twice
daily, and if work is offered him, he must take it, provided that the
nature of the employment and the rate of pay be, so far as
practicable, similar to what the man had been getting while in work.
But he cannot be asked to fill a place left vacant in consequence of a
trade dispute. Unmarried men, with no dependants living at Cologne,
are required to take work away from that city, if offered to them,
their fares being paid for them.
“No money is paid in respect of unemployment caused by illness or
infirmity, or by the man’s own fault, or by a trade dispute.
“The administration of the affairs of this Insurance Office is in the
hands of the Executive Committee, the Committee of the Insured, and
the General Meeting of Members.
“The Executive Committee consists of the head of the Cologne
Municipality (_Oberbürgermeister_) or his delegate, of the President
for the time being of the Cologne Labour Registry, and of twenty-four
members, twelve elected by the insured workmen, and twelve patrons or
honorary members (six employers and six employees) chosen by the
patrons and honorary members.
“The twelve representatives of the insured on the Executive Committee,
together with the business manager of the office, form the Committee
of the Insured, referred to above.
“The Executive Committee has the right to decline to make any further
insurance contracts, should it become doubtful whether the fund is
adequate to meet further liabilities; and on two occasions (in 1901-2
and 1902-3) it became necessary to suspend operations in this manner.”
What an excellent plan this is! The working man has, I know, his sick
club, his benefit society, to which he must subscribe. If he is a
member of a Trades Union there again is another claim upon his purse.
But all working men are not members of Trades Unions. The greater the
skill of the trained mechanic, for example, the more the disfavour
with which he regards the Trades Unions. It is a splendid thing to be
a member of a great and powerful organization which has for its object
to ensure that every man shall be paid a living wage. But when a Union
forces all its members to a dead level of equality with that of the
least skilled, when the good workman is compelled to do no more work,
and no better work, than the worst workman in the confederation, then
the good workman very naturally takes his name off the books. Once
more, many working men, especially in the country, are fairly sure of
always being able to obtain work if they are prepared to do it. But in
the great, crowded, competitive centres of England, the uncertainty of
regular employment, especially in regard to unskilled labour, the
establishment of such a system of insurance would be of incalculable
benefit, nor do I believe that the infinitesimal premium would be
regretted or missed by any sensible and hard-working man.
You may object that probably the funds of the insurance companies
might possibly come to be diverted to the support and assistance of
the _won’t_ works--the Unemployables. Please hear me to the end and
you will see that this objection cannot be upheld.
I do not appeal to the experience of despotic Germany but of
democratic Belgium when I describe the largest Continental Labour
Colony, that of Merxplas in Belgium. During the present year I have
spent some months in Belgium, and have been enabled to gather the
opinions of all sorts of people upon the subject. Every thinking man I
have consulted in this country is emphatic in his praise of the
institution.
The Law of November 27, 1891, “for the repression of vagrancy and
begging,” which came into operation on January, 4, 1892, imposed upon
the Belgian Government the duty of organizing correctional
establishments to be called (A) Beggars’ Depôts, (B) Houses of Refuge,
and (C) Reformatory Schools. The Labour Colonies are maintained in
order to fulfil the requirements of the Law under (A) and (B).
All persons confined in a Beggars’ Depôt or in a House of Refuge, not
suffering from incapacity, are to be put to work of such nature as may
be prescribed, and shall, unless deprived thereof as a measure of
discipline, receive a daily wage, part of which shall be kept in hand
and credited to the “leaving fund” of the inmate in respect of whose
labour the same shall be paid.
The Minister of Justice fixes, with respect to the Beggars’ Depôts and
Houses of Refuge, the rate of wage which the inmates shall receive,
and the deductions to be retained out of this wage towards the
“leaving fund.” This fund is handed over partly in the shape of cash,
partly in that of clothing and tools, when the inmate is discharged.
The internal regulations of the Beggars’ Depôts and Houses of Refuge
are settled by Royal Decree. Any person confined in either class of
institution may be ordered to undergo solitary confinement.
The classes of persons whom the magistrates are directed (by Article
13 of the Law) to send to be confined in a Beggars’ Depôt, are all
persons not suffering from incapacity, who instead of providing
themselves with the means of existence by labour, abuse the charity of
the public by habitual mendicancy; those persons who, through
laziness, or drunken or immoral habits, pass their lives in vagrancy,
and those who live on the earnings of vice (_souteneurs de filles
publiques_).
Merxplas is reached from Antwerp by a steam tramway running through a
cultivated country with occasional stretches of pine plantations.
There are only a few villages, all small, and there is no place which
can be in any way styled a town on the way to Merxplas, or indeed,
within a considerable radius round the colony. The surrounding country
is sandy heath, with pine plantations, but this is transformed at
Merxplas by the manual labour of the colonists into excellent
agricultural land, with fields and gardens neatly cultivated and
well-grown avenues of oak, poplar, and pines. Such a transformation
has been rendered more easy by the nature of the sub-soil, which is
clay everywhere underlying the top-soil of sand. The buildings are
large and handsome, and of good design. They seem excellently built.
The main block consists of a large quadrangle, and is entered by a
principal gate on the western side. The offices of administration are
centred round this gate, with dining-halls capable of seating 1500
colonists at a time, on the left, and reception-rooms, baths,
fire-engine house, etc., on the right. The _quartier cellulaire_ as
the prison for refractory colonists is named, is easily marked by the
exercise grounds. To this is attached on one side a barracks for 150
soldiers and on the other a building set apart for the _immoraux_.
The east side, opposite to the main gate, is occupied by the hospital
in the centre, and by two wings on each side for the _infirmes_, who
are still capable of light work, and for the _incurables_, who are
unfit for any kind of labour. The remaining side on the north consists
of four long galleries, _chauffoirs_, which are intended for the use
of the colonists in inclement weather. Between these, placed
centrally, are the lavatories and the canteen. There also is a
library, from which they can obtain books on Sunday, in which at the
time of our visit a tramp choir was practising with considerable skill
under a tramp organist, and without any supervision.
The dormitories are four large buildings on the west front flanking
the approach to the main gate, and beyond these lies the large new
church which the colonists have just erected. This will hold 1500 men
standing, and is a very effective building. Adjoining are the
farm-buildings, which are nearly all on a very lavish scale, and
thoroughly modern in construction. To the northward are the
workshops. All these also are admirably built, and are thoroughly
suited to their purposes. Beyond these lie the brickyards, stoneyards,
pottery works, tannery, cement yard, etc.