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in great measure a matter of public concern. If the Lecture Housing of the Working Classes Acts have in the main benefited artisans, something has of recent years been done towards meeting any wish for allotments' which may be cherished by country labourers, who cannot themselves afford to purchase or to obtain a lease of lands at the market rate, or who, as is possible, live in villages where no landlord is willing to sell or let allotments. The local authorities are now, under the Allotments Acts, empowered to obtain land, and, if necessary, under the system of compulsory purchase, which they are to relet to labourers.

3

The growth of modern collectivism has naturally coincided with the disposition to revive or to extend the socialistic element which has always been latent in some of the older institutions of England, and notably in the English Poor Law. The strength of this tendency will be best seen by a comparison or contrast between the ideas which produced and characterised the Poor Law reform of 1834, and the ideas which in 1905 have already to a certain extent changed the law, and to a still greater extent modified the administration of poor relief. The reformers of 1834 considered the existence of the Poor Law a great, though for the moment a necessary evil. They cut down its operation within limits as narrow as public opinion would then tolerate. They expected to put an end at some not very distant date 1 Allotments Acts, 1887-1890 (50 & 51 Vict. c. 48, and 53 & 54 Vict. c. 65).

2 See Report of Charity Organization Society on Relief of Distress due to Want of Employment, Nov. 1904.

3 Which has been fostered by the provisions of the Local Government Act, 1894 (56 & 57 Vict. c. 73), s. 20, as to the election and qualification of poor-law guardians.

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Lecture to out-door relief. Nor can one doubt that many of them hoped that the Poor Law itself might at last be done away with. As late as 1869 the central authorities struggled to increase the strictness with which outdoor relief was administered, and in 1871 Professor Fawcett, a fair representative of the economists of that day, still apparently advocated its abolition.' The reformers, moreover, specially relied on the use of two means for at any rate restricting the administration of poor relief. The one was the confining it in the very sternest manner to the relief of destitution; the aim of relief was in their eyes to avert starvation, not to bestow comfort; the second was the association of pauperism-a very different thing from mere poverty --with disgrace; hence the recipient of poor relief lost, because he was a pauper, his rights as an elector.* The tide of opinion has turned; the very desire to restrict out-door relief has, as regards popular sentiment, all but vanished. The idea of putting an end to poor relief altogether lies far out of the range of practical politics. Much has already been done to diminish the discomfort and the discredit which may attach itself to pauperism. The Out-door Relief (Friendly Societies) Act, 1894, authorised boards of guardians, when granting out-door relief, not to take into consideration any sum up to five shillings a week received by the applicant as member of a friendly society. The Out-door Relief (Friendly Societies) Act,

1 See Fawcett, Pauperism, pp. 26-35. gradual abolition of the poor law itself. pp. 83, 84.

3

In 1872 he hoped for the Fawcett, Essays and Lectures,

2 See Steph., Comm. ii. (14th ed.) 295; and Representation of People Act, 1832, s. 36; Parliamentary and Municipal Registration Act, 1878, ss. 7, 12.

3 57 & 58 Vict. c. 25.

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1904,1 has made a course of action which was optional Lecture imperative. Nor is the anticipation unwarranted that other classes will, at no distant date, obtain the consideration or indulgence which is extended to members of friendly societies. Discredit, indeed, still attaches to the receipt of poor relief, yet Parliament has already done much to diminish the force of a sentiment which men of admitted wisdom have been accustomed to regard as a valuable, if not our chief, safeguard against the spread of pauperism; the receipt of out-door relief in the shape of medicine no longer disqualifies the recipient from exercising the functions of an elector.2

14 Edw. VII. c. 32.

"In granting out-door relief to a member of any friendly society, the board of guardians shall not take into con"sideration any sum received from such friendly society as sick pay, except in so far as such sum shall exceed five shillings a week" (8. 1, sub. s. 2).

66

The effect of this enactment seems to be that, assuming ten shillings a week to be the sum adequate to save a man who has no property whatever from actual destitution, an applicant for relief who, as member of a friendly society, receives a pension of five shillings a week, will be entitled to receive by way of out-door relief ten shillings more, and thus receive five shillings beyond his strict needs. Nor is it easy to see how a board of guardians can now practically exercise the power, which the board still apparently possesses, of refusing to give out-door relief at all to a person entitled to sick pay from a friendly society. If so the Out-door Relief (Friendly Societies) Act, 1904, distinctly strikes at attempts to cut down out-door relief. 2 The Medical Relief Disqualification Removal Act, 1885. See Steph., Comm. ii. 296. Leading statesmen, whether they call themselves Conservatives or Liberals, are ready or eager to go still farther along the dangerous path on which Parliament has hesitatingly entered. The President of the Local Government Board is ready, by straining to the very utmost powers conferred upon him for another purpose under the Local Authorities (Expenses) Act, 1887 (50 & 51 Vict. c. 72), s. 3, to sanction expenditure by Borough Councils which is admittedly ultra vires, and thus create a sort of Borough Council common poor-fund, which may in effect give to the unemployed relief untrammelled by the restrictions imposed by the poor law (see Report of Charity Organization Society, 1904, p. 6); and Sir H. Campbell

VIII.

Lecture The general trend of legislation is often as clearly traceable in Bills laid before Parliament, which have not passed into law, as in statutes. From this point

1

of view the Bills of 1904 are full of instruction. They discover the wishes of the electors. They reveal, for instance, the widespread desire for laws which make for the equalisation of advantages. The methods proposed for the attainment of this end are various. One is the provision, at the expense of the tax-payers, of old age pensions, either for every applicant who has attained the age of sixty-five, or for any person of sixty-five who belongs to the indefinable class of the deserving poor. The creation of a system of old age pensions has been recommended, though not fully thought out, both by zealous philanthropists who pity the sufferings, and by politicians of undoubted humanity who possibly desire the votes, of the wageEnthusiasts, again, who have been impressed with the indisputable fact that poverty may exist in connection with merit, have propounded a scheme under which the Guardians of the Poor are to be authorised, and, no doubt, if the plan should receive the approbation of Parliament, will soon be enjoined, to provide the "necessitous deserving aged poor" with cottage homes where the inhabitants "will be treated "with regard to food and other comforts with suitable

earners.

consideration," or, in other words, will enjoy at least as much comfort as and perhaps more comfort than usually falls to the lot of the energetic working-man who, towards the close of his life, has out of his earn

Bannerman, as leader of the Opposition, has announced that he is "in favour of exemption from disenfranchisement of the recipients of "temporary poor law relief" (Morning Post, 1st December 1904, p. 9). 1 See p. 274, ante.

1

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ings and savings provided himself with a modest Lecture independence. All these plans, whatever their advantages, have some features in common. They all try to divest the receipt of relief from the rates of the discredit and the disabilities which have hitherto attached to pauperism; they negative the idea that it is, as a rule, the duty of every citizen to provide for his own needs, not only in youth, but in old age; and that if age, as depriving a man of capacity to work, may be termed a disease, yet it is a malady so likely to occur as to create a special obligation to ensure against its occurrence. Would not the stern but successful reformers of 1834 have held that old age pensions and comfortable cottage homes, provided at the cost of the tax-payers, were little better than a decent but insidious form of out-door relief for the aged? 2

Among Bills which aim at the equalisation of advantages may be numbered a proposal significant, rather than important, for the removal of every limit

1 "No person admitted to a [cottage] home shall be considered a 'pauper, or be subject to any such disabilities as persons in receipt of "parochial relief" (Cottage Homes Bill, 1904, sec. 7).

"A person whose name is on the pensioners' list shall not be de"prived of any right to be registered as a parliamentary or county voter by reason only of the fact that he or she has been in receipt of 'poor law relief" (Old Age Pensions Bill, sec. 8).

2 Might they not have smiled grimly at the notion of a parliamentary enactment that a man supported by parish relief and provided at the expense of the parish with a comfortable cottage should not be "considered a pauper" (Cottage Homes Bill, sec. 7), and have suggested that citizens should be trained to dread the reality rather than to shun the name of pauperism? What would they have thought of the sentiment or the sentimentality which has induced the Local Government Board to sanction the suggestion that in registers of births a workhouse should be referred to by some name (e.g. Little Peddlington Hall), which might conceal the fact that a child there born was born in a workhouse and not in a private residence?