were adopted a great decrease of pauperism was the immediate result, and where they have been adhered to pauperism has been kept at a low level. But in several cases there has been a reaction.
Apart from that, it cannot be said that the Circular has had much recognition, even from later Presidents of the Local Government Board, and all the tendency, both legislative and administrative, has been to extend widely the responsibilities of the State in regard to poor relief. Whilst in the last twenty years the Poor Law expenditure has about doubled itself, much of the relief of the poor has been taken outside the Poor Law altogether. Mr Chamberlain's Circular of 1886, by which vestries and borough councils were instructed to find work for the unemployed, was the thin end of the wedge which has opened the way to the Unemployed Workmen Act, and to much that is to come. The State has once more accepted the responsibility for "setting the poor to work," which it took upon itself by the Elizabethan Poor Law, and from which it shook itself free in 1834. The Provision of Meals Act and the Government Old Age Pensions Bill, which is probably in print by this time, are further departures from the principles laid down by the Circular of 1869.
And now, perhaps, I may be allowed to call your attention to certain principles underlying the whole question, the first of which is the effect that relief has upon character, and the special dangers of State relief. Indiscriminate charity is, of course, an unmixed evil, but it differs from State relief in that it can never be looked upon as a right, that it has definite limits, and that it cannot be used to anything like the same extent as a means of political bribery: if it is so, the person who makes use of it has at least to bear the cost himself, and that alone sets a limit to its extension. But the crucial danger of State relief is that it comes to be looked upon as a right, and as a means of evading the troubles and responsibilities of life, and that it tends to remove life's
