always with you,' he cannot have meant that we were 'always' to be giving them money, but that we were 'always' to be 'doing good' to them. Now the only real 'good' is done by helping those to work who could not do it without our help.
But, instead of this, we say to those who can't find work, 'Go into the workhouse.' If indeed it were what its name implies, a house for work, an 'Adult Industrial Home,' there would be some sense in it.
But our national common sense has not yet arrived at this result: take out all the sick, infirm, those who have lost either for a time or for life all producing power, cure them or make them as comfortable as you can. And for the rest, those who have only half lost their producing power, or have not lost it, but, from want of education, want of knowledge of industrial and commercial matters, want of geography, in short, of faculty, know just as little as the madman whom our political economy does not leave to pick up his own living, how to utilise their producing power; say to these, Come and we will help you to find work.
The wage-producing power of the population is said to equal the consumption. This may be; but the Poor Law statistics show us exactly how much of the producing power is squandered on those who cannot produce, because we don't help them.
Now, as above said, the wages of a nation ought to cover the maintenance both of the producers and of the sick and infirm depending upon them.
Without falling in the least into the error of the French or Spanish 'Ateliers Nationaux,' surely it is possible for a Poor Law to help its poor to find work—where work is in one place and labour in another, to bring them together.
This restoring the balance betwixt the labourer and his work was one of the original objects of the reformed Poor Law. In the report of the Poor Law Commissioners for 1837 it is stated that not only was emigration encouraged but that 'the over-stocked labour market' in one county had been 'relieved of 2,000' profitless mouths sent to the manufacturing districts 'at a cost of 3,600l.' with the practical result of lowering their cost to the rates from 2,000l. to 65l.
So far as concerns the able-bodied and non-criminal poor, the real function of a Poor Law is neither to punish nor to feed, but to train them to self-dependence and industry, a branch of national education, which is in small sense helped by reading, writing and figures, or by any 'conscience clause' which can be framed.
There must be of course the natural premium of work, viz. pay, subject, of course, to the natural rise and fall of prices in the labour market.
Three not rich ladies have solved this insoluble problem for about twenty-five poor women, weak in intellect, weak in habits of temperance, in an 'adult industrial home.'[1] These are just the helpless class we find in workhouses, just the class with whom, says the Poor Law, we can do nothing. They were set to laundry and other work for which they were fit, and the earnings of these poor incompetents have amounted the last two years to between 800l. and 900l. a year. Each of the inmates has a share in the profits of the laundry. Here was a successful depauperising experiment. The Poor Law would have set them to pick oakum as a test of hunger, and have said, How
- ↑ Miss Hurry's, St. Stephen's Home, Shepherd's Bush, W.
