Committees, and we find that there were 25,268 applications, of which 51 per cent, were recurrent, that is to say, that the applicants had applied in former years. Only about one in five get work, and that of a casual nature. It is plain that many of them gravitate between Distress Committees and the Poor Law and various charities, whilst their children are fed at the schools. The general public is probably unaware of the wretched and precarious existence that is led by these unhappy victims of State bounty. Jobs of work, school dinners and the like, are in reality subsidies to the casual labourer, who is able to produce children much faster than the State can maintain them.
And so we have in London at the present time a lamentable confusion of relief. So far from one form of relief being the substitute for another, relief leads to more relief, and there is constant and continuous increase. There is little or no co-operation between the administering bodies, and no reasoned plan for dealing with the problem of poverty. Everything is piecemeal and chaotic. And as the result we have an ever-growing proletariat population, chiefly composed of casual labourers, who are maintained in turn (and sometimes simultaneously) by Poor Law Guardians, Distress Committees, Education and Health Authorities, and other public bodies. By the admission of everybody casual labour is one of the most crying evils of the day, and we meet it by establishing centres of casual labour all over the country. What is worst of all, perhaps, is that we are fast losing the power of taking stock of our position, because we bury public relief in the statistics of various branches of public administration and disguise it as education, public health, or the reward of industry.
We shall never get back to a healthier position until the public realise that the problem of public relief is the most difficult and critical that any nation has to deal with, and is one which requires the undivided and concentrated attention of the community as a separate branch of
