As I see it, what we have to do is this--we must establish colonies in
which the Unemployables shall spend their lives. When once a man has
been proved to be irreclaimable by ordinary methods, when a properly
established tribunal, after searching inquiry, has pronounced him a
burden and a drag upon the community, then I would put him away for
life, if he is irreclaimable, and continues to remain so.
I would make his life just as pleasant as he himself chose to make it.
If he refused to work, then his lot should be a prison cell and bread
and water until he did. If he made the best of the situation in which
his own fault had placed him, he should be enabled to earn enough to
keep him in considerable comfort, and to provide him with harmless and
judicious pleasures.
Such a man should live in a state of almost freedom. The one thing
denied him would be the privilege of mixing with the outside world and
of reproducing his kind. Such gratifications and amusements as he had
earned should be supplied him with no ungrudging hand. The
consolations of religion should be always at his command and should
be constantly brought before him.
But he should not be allowed to beget children who would swell the
ranks of the Unemployable and increase the intolerable burden already
carried by the honest working man. It is just about as certain as
science and economic experience can make it, that the child of an
Unemployable will become an Unemployable too. It is possible that one
child in a thousand may turn out a decent citizen. That is about the
maximum percentage, and if, for the sake of possibly producing one
ordinary worker we ought to allow nine hundred and ninety-nine
hopeless idlers to come into existence, then I have nothing more to
say.
I do not think such a position can be maintained for a moment. I
venture to think that you will agree with me.
I admit that such a method would be inhuman, immoral and unchristian,
if we were to treat the hopeless social failure as a criminal pure and
simple. Let us make his life as happy as he chooses to make it; treat
him as a criminal if he won’t work in the colony, comfort and pet him
if he will. But we need go no further than this. I do not honestly
think that our duty as Christians or sociologists imposes more
consideration upon us than just this. “If thine arm offend thee cut it
off.”
Sir Robert Anderson, for many years Assistant Commissioner of
Metropolitan Police, has long held the view that the professional
criminal is not a necessity of civilization, and that a reform of the
method of dealing with him would soon bring about his complete
extinction. Sir Robert, with his extensive Scotland Yard experience
behind him, declares that the number of high-class criminals in
England does not exceed a few dozen, and that if these were got out of
the way organized crime against property would cease. The plan which
Sir Robert Anderson has conceived is that of providing asylums in
place of the present prisons, where a man who has proved to have
devoted his life to crime would be sent for life and made to earn his
living.
We must provide asylums for the Unemployables also, in order to
preserve ourselves. It is no use being sentimental. We must relegate
social parasites to a state and condition where they can no longer
infest the social body and cannot increase in numbers. When we have
done this, when you working men have done this, in less than a
generation the question of the Unemployed will be satisfactorily
settled. It may well be, moreover, that such a method will change the
least degraded Unemployables into honest, hard-working citizens who
can be once more admitted into the world on probation.
These are my opinions, and though I have given you but a sketch of
them to-night, I submit that they are at least reasonable and worth
consideration.
The words of the poet Shelley are no less applicable in the present
than they were in the past. He had an unconquerable faith in the
spiritual destiny of our race, and his lines, when he wrote his “song
to the men of England” were filled with flame:--
“The seed ye sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears.
Sow seed--but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth--let no impostor heap;
Weave robes--let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defence to bear.”