THE MINORITY REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION OF 1905-1909
We have described how the Majority Report of the Royal Commission professedly accepts the "Principles of 1907," but attempts to graft them upon a new Destitution Authority, and then inevitably finds itself compelled—seeing that these principles are incompatible with the very nature of a Destitution Authority—to revert, in reality, to the "Principles of 1834." The Minority Report on the other hand, carries the "Principles of 1907" to their logical conclusion; and at the same time discovers to us the unifying principle on which they have been unconsciously based, and by which alone their possible costliness can be limited and justified. Thus the Minority Report finds, at the stage to which English Local Government has now attained, absolutely no need for a Poor Law Authority, or for any policy of "relieving" destitution on any principles whatsoever. It finds the other Public Authorities already dealing, on the Principles of Curative Treatment, Compulsion, and Universal Provision, and as a part of their normal functions in connection with the population at large, with all the different sections of the pauper host; the Local Education Authority providing for many destitute children of school age; the Local Health Authority for many destitute infants, and sick and infirm persons; the Local Lunacy Authority for actually a majority of the destitute mentally defective; the Local Pension Authority for hundreds of thousands of destitute aged; and the Local Unemployment Authority, now to be reinforced by a National Unemployment Authority, for innumerable destitute able-bodied. Thus, as already stated, there are to-day actually more destitute personsbeing maintained at the public expense outside the Poor Law than inside its scope. What seems clearly inevitable is the continuation of this evolution, and the transfer to these several Public Authoritiesof the remainder of each section of the destitutefor whom the Board of Guardians is still providing. Those children of school age who are still being looked after by the Poor Law Authority will be increasingly entrusted to the Local Education Authority; those sick persons who are still included among the paupers will more and more be merged in those already under treatment by the Local Health Authority; those mentally defective and feeble-minded who still cumber the workhouses will presently be handed over to the Lunacy Authorities; the remnant of the healthy aged who are still classed as paupers will inevitably be dealt with among the much larger number already under the care of the Local Pension Committee; whilst those able-bodied persons who are being relieved as vagrants or paupers, together with the "Unemployed" now on the registers of the Distress Committees, will come under the supervision and control of the new National Authority for the able-bodied, of which the beginning is seen in the Labour Exchanges Act of 1909. This, we suggest, is plainly the lesson of the day.
The gist of the Minority Report so far, at any rate, as the non-able-bodied are concerned may be put even more shortly. The Poor Law and the Poor Law Authorities—necessary at an earlier stage of Local Government, when destitution would otherwise have gone undealt with—can now simply be merged in the ordinary functions of municipal and county administration Only in this way can we put an end to the costly and extravagant overlapping that now exists between the Poor Law Authority, on the one hand, and all the other Authorities on the other.
The Principle of Prevention
From the Minority Report proposals, thus succinctly put, we have so far omitted what is really the kernel of the whole matter. These ordinary functions of municipal and county administration—the hospitals and schools and asylums and the domiciliary treatment of one kind or another—are costly; and they are apparently especially costly the more consciously andthe more systematically we administer them on the Principles of Curative Treatment, Compulsion, and Universal Provision. If we hand over to the Local Education Authorities those children for whom the Boards of Guardians still provide; to the Local Health Authorities those infants, sick and infirm, who are still under the Poor Law; to the Local Lunacy Authorities the feeble-minded still retained in the workhouse; to the Local Pension Authorities the aged who have not yet got national pensions; and to the Unemployment Authorities, local or national, the vagrants and other able-bodied persons who are still among the paupers, will not this involve, in comparison with the cost under the Board of Guardians, a great increase of public expenditure, and can any such increase be justified?
We need not, at this point, stay to argue that, owing to the practical abandonment of the "Principles of 1834," the administration of the Board of Guardians has itself become very costly; that children in Poor Law Schools and patients in Poor Law Infirmaries often cost more per head than children in the boarding schools of the Local Education Authority and patients in the hospitals of the Local Health Authority; and that seeing that the very existence of overlapping Public Authorities and duplication of work is, in itself, a wasteful extravagance, there is no reason to expect any increase in net cost from the mere fact of the transfer.
In the view of the Minority Commissioners what is more important is that the whole development of Municipal and County administration, of which we may take the Public Health Acts as the leading example, is justified to the rate-payer and to the economist,by the still greater expense that it prevents. The Minority Report embodies a whole series of proposals, which would amount, as has been expressly said, to setting on foot a systematic crusade against the very occurrence of destitution in any of its forms: against the destitution caused by Unemployment, the destitution caused by Old Age, the destitution caused by Feeble-mindedness and Lunacy, the destitution caused by Ill-health and Disease, and the destitution cause by Neglected Infancy and Neglected Childhood.
The deliberate and systematic adoption of this Principle of Prevention is the very basis of the Minority Report proposals. It is, in fact, this principle which underlies all thethree "Principles of 1907," that we traced in a previous chapter as the outcome of all the practical experience of the last seventy-five years. The Local Authorities do not apply the Principle of Curative Treatment wholly, or even mainly, for the pleasure or the advantage of the individual sufferer; what they have in view is the prevention of future evils to the community from the spread or recurrence of the disease, or the continuance of the disability. When they apply the Principle of Compulsion, they do so, not for its own sake, and not even for the immediate advantage that it brings, but in order to prevent greater evils to the community in the future, such as the existence of illiterate and wholly uneducated persons, or the outbreaks of violent lunatics, or the more subtle degradation of the Standard of Life by the procreation of the feeble-minded and the undermining competition of degenerates. If, in one service or another, the Principle of Universal Provision is adopted, it is because we have become convinced, with regard to that service, that Universal Provision, either gratuitously or at a charge, is actually less expensive than any alternative; or that it is of such great importance to the community to "maximise the consumption" that it may be looked upon as really preventing some more costly evil. Throughout the whole field we find this Principle of Prevention at once limiting the real cost to the community, and justifying the outlay. In some cases, indeed, the application of the Principle of Prevention is so successful as to bring to an end the very outlay which it has inspired. To put up a smallpox hospital is costly; but it may end in freeing the community from smallpox, with the result that the building stands empty. By starting special treatment for ring-worm and favus, the most enterprising Local Education Authorities now see their way to the total elimination of these diseases from their schools.
Now, the inherent vice of the vast expenditure at present incurred by our Poor Law Authorities is, to the economist, not its amount, nor its indiscriminateness, but the absence of this Principle of Prevention. Except with regard to the small minority of "indoor" or "boarded-out" children, and a small proportion of the sick, it cannot be said that the Poor Law Authorities make any attempt to prevent the occurrence of destitution. It is, indeed, not their business to do so.Unlike the Local Health Authority, the Destitution Authorities can do nothing to alter the social environment which is continually producing new destitution. They can do nothing for the man who is just beginning to suffer from phthisis, but who still earns wages and is not yet destitute; though they know that, in a year or two, for lack of proper provision at the incipient stage, the man will become gradually worse, and will eventually enter the workhouse, long after the curable stage has passed, merely to die. Unlike the Local Education Authorities, the Destitution Authorities cannot reach out to prevent the neglect of children which will, in time, produce "unemployables." The whole of the action and the whole of the expenditure of the existing Boards of Guardians, and equally that of the new Public Assistance Authorities proposed in the Majority Report, must, in law, be confined to the relief of a destitution which has already occurred.
If we wish to prevent the very occurrence of destitution, and effectively cure it when it occurs, we must look to its causes. Now, deferring for the moment any question of human fallibility, or the "double dose of original sin," which most of us are apt to ascribe to those who succumb in the struggle, the investigations of this Royal Commission reveal three broad roads along one or other of which practically all paupers come to destitution, namely: (a) sickness and feeble-mindedness, howsoever caused; (b) neglected infancy and childhood, whosoever may be in fault; and (c) unemployment (including "under-employment"), by whatsoever occasioned. If we could prevent sickness and feeble-mindedness, howsoever caused, or effectually treat it when it occurs; if we could ensure that no child, whatever its parentage, went without what we may call the National Minimum of nurture and training; and if we could provide that no able-bodied person was left to suffer from long-continued or chronic unemployment, we should prevent at least nine-tenths of the destitution that now costs the Poor Law Authorities of the United Kingdom nearly twenty millions per annum. The proposal of the Minority Report to break up the Poor Law, and to transfer its several services to the Local Education, Health, Lunacy, and Pension Authorities, and to a National Authority for the able-bodied, is to hand over the task oftreating curatively the several sections of the destitute toAuthorities charged with the prevention of the several causes of destitutionfrom which those sections are suffering. This means a systematic attempt to arrest each of the principal causes of eventual destitution at the very outset, in the most incipient stage of its attack, which is always an attack of an individual human being, not of the family as a whole. It is one person, at the outset, who has the cough of incipient phthisis, not a whole family; though if no preventive force is brought to bear, destitution will eventually set in and the whole family will be on our hands. There may be in the family neglected infants, neglected children, or feeble-minded persons lacking proper care or control, who may not be technically destitute, who may even be dependents of able-bodied men in work, but who, if left uncared for, will inevitably become the destitute of subsequent years. Hence it is vital that the Local Health Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure proper treatment for the incipient stages of all diseases. It is vital that the Lunacy Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure proper care and control for all persons certifiable as mentally defective, long before the family to which they belong is reduced to destitution. It is vital that the Local Education Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure, quite irrespective of the family's destitution, whatever Parliament may prescribe as the National Minimum of nurture and training for all children, the neglect of which will otherwise bring these children, when they grow up, themselves to a state of destitution. It is becoming no less clear that some Authority—the Minority Commissioners say a National Authority—must register and deal with the man who is unemployed, long before extended unemployment has demoralised him and reduced his family to destitution. It is important to put the issue quite clearly before the public. The systematic campaign for the prevention of the occurrence of destitution, that the Minority Commissioners propose that the community should undertake by grappling with its principal causes at the incipient stages,when they are just beginning to affect one or other members of a family only, long before the family as a whole has sunk into the morass of destitution, involves treating the individual memberwho is affected, in respect of the cause of his complaint, even before he is "disabled" or in pecuniary distress. It means a systematic searching out of incipient cases, just as the Medical Officer of Health searches out infectious disease, or the School Attendance Officer searches out children who are not on the school roll, even before application is made.[859]
At present the Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, and the Local Lunacy Authorities only feebly and imperfectly grapple with their task of arresting the causes of destitution in the child, the sick person, or the person of unsoundmind, partly because they have only lately begun this part of their work, but principally because they have not been legally empowered and legally required to do it. Moreover, they do not yet have forced on their attention, as they would if they had to maintain those who needed to be cured,the extent to which they fail to prevent. If the Health Committee knew that it would have eventually to maintain the sick men whom it allowed to sink gradually into phthisis, as it has now practically to maintain persons who contract smallpox, it would look with a different eye upon the Medical Officer of Health's desire to "search out" every case of incipient phthisis whilst it is yet curable, to press upon the ignorant sufferer the best hygienic advice, and to do what is necessary in order to enable the insidious progress of the disease to be arrested. This does not entail that all diseases shall be treated free, any more than the Public Health supervision of sanitation entails that bad landlords shall have their house drainage provided at the public cost. All the increased activity of the Public Health Authorities in searching out and treating sickness may coincide with a systematic enforcement of personal responsibility in respect to personal hygiene, and with regard to the maintenance in health of dependents, which we, in fact, recommend. The break-up of the Poor Law implies, in short, not only the adoption of a systematic crusade against the several preventable causes of destitution, but also a far more effective enforcement of parental responsibility than is at present practicable.
Viewed in this light, the fear of an increased charge upon public funds fades away. Prevention is not only better, but also much cheaper, than cure. What the Minority Report asserts—and the assertion cannot fairly be judged except by reading the elaborate survey of the facts and the whole careful argument, that it has now become possible, with the application of this Principle of Prevention by the various Public Authorities already at work, for destitution, as we now know it, to be abolished and extirpated from our midst, to the extent, at least, that plague and cholera and typhus and illiteracy and the labour of little children in cotton factories have already been abolished. If this confident assertion is only partially borne out by experience, it is clear that, far from involving anyincrease of aggregate cost to the community, the abolition of the Poor Law and of the Poor Law Authority will have been a most economical measure.
The "Moral Factor" in the Problem of Destitution
There are those who see in this proposal to "break up" the Poor Law, and to entrust the conduct of the campaign against destitution to the Local Education Authority, the Local Health Authority, the Local Lunacy Authority, the Local Pension Authority, and the National or Local Authorities dealing with unemployment, an ignoring of what they call the "moral factor." To speak of the prevention of destitution in terms of the functions of these Authorities seems, to such critics, equivalent to implying that all destitution is due to causes over which the individual has no control—thus putting aside the contributing causes of idleness, extravagance, drunkenness, gambling, and all sorts of irregularity of life. But this is to misconceive the position taken up by the Minority Commissioners, and to fail in appreciation of their proposals. They do not deny—indeed, what observer could possibly deny or minimise?—the extent to which the destitution of whole families is caused or aggravated by personal defects and shortcomings in one or other of their members, and most frequently in the husband and father upon whom the family maintenance normally depends.
The Minority Commissioners certainly do not ignore the fact that what has to be aimed at is not this or that improvement in material circumstances or physical comfort, but an improvement in personal character. To use a metaphor from the card table, this improvement of personal character in the human subject is the "odd trick" for which social reformers are struggling, and by which alone success can be secured. But we cannot win the "odd trick" without winning the six others.
Two considerations may make the position clear. However large may be the part in producing destitution that we may choose to ascribe to the "moral factor"—to defects or shortcomings in the character of the unfortunate victims themselves—the fact that the investigations of the Royal Commissionindicate that at least nine-tenths of all the paupers arrive at pauperismalong one or other of three roads—the Road of Neglected Childhood, the Road of Sickness and Feeble-mindedness, and the Road of Unemployment (including "Under-employment"), must give us pause. If it can be said that it is to some defect of moral character or personal shortcoming that the sinking into destitution at the bottom of the road is, in a final analysis, more correctly to be ascribed—though on this point which among us is qualified to be a judge?—it is abundantly clear that the assumed defect or shortcoming manifests itself in, or at least is accompanied by, either child-neglect, sickness, feeble-mindedness, or unemployment. These are the roads by which the future pauper travels. Moreover, if these outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual shortcomings are sometimes caused by these latter, it is at least equally true that the defects of character are aggravated and confirmed by their evil accompaniments.
It is by dealing with the individual through these manifestations or accompaniments of his inward defect, that we can most successfully bring to bear our curative and restorative influences. What is certain is that if we could put an end to neglected infancy, neglected childhood, and neglected youth, by whomsoever occasioned; if we could prevent all preventable sickness and infirmity, however caused; if we could either ameliorate or segregate the feeble-minded; if we could make impossible any long-continued unemployment and any chronic "under-employment," whatever its origin, we should have prevented the occurrence of nine-tenths of the destitution that is now annually created.
The second consideration is that all experience shows that it is impossible even to begin to deal successfully with personal character until we dismiss the idea of relieving destitution as such, and go boldly for a definite policy of preventing or arresting the operation of each separate cause of destitution. Take, for instance, the destitution brought about by drink. Under the Poor Law—under any Poor Law—the drunkard cannot be touched until he is in a state of destitution. A man may be neglecting his children, leaving his wife without medical attendance, or maltreating a feeble-minded child, and yet no Poor Law Authority can do anything toprevent the destitution which will probably ensue. It is only when the man is suffering from delirium tremens that he is taken into the workhouse, put into a clean bed, with two attendants to look after him, dosed with the costly and agreeable morphia, and then, when he has recovered from his debauch and can return to his work, let out to begin his evil courses again. Under the system proposed by the Minority Report of making the Education Authority, the Public Health Authority, and the Lunacy Authority responsible for searching out the incipient destitution of the neglected child, the sick wife, and the maltreated feeble-minded child, the drinking head of the family would have been called to book long before he found himself in the comfortable quarters of the workhouse. Indeed, it seems apparent that, once the Public Health Authority was responsible for searching out diseases, one of the first diseases which would call for systematic prevention and cure would be chronic alcoholism.
Take, again, the destitution brought about by unemployment. So long as this is relieved by a Destitution Authority there is no chance of enforcing the responsibility of every able-bodied person to maintain himself and his family. We may, of course, deter men from getting relief out of the rates, but we shall not deter them from being parasitic on other people, or from allowing their dependants to sink into a state of destitution. If, however, we had an Unemployment Authority responsible for either finding a man a job or placing him in training, we could for the first time strictly enforce on every man and woman who were, as a matter of fact, failing to maintain themselves and their dependants, the obligation to make use of this organ of the State. When the visitor from the Children's Care Committee discovered an underfed child, or the Health Visitor discovered a woman about to be confined without proper nursing and medical attendance, it would be no use for the man to say he was out of work. It would be unnecessary to inquire why he was out of work, whether his unemployment was due to his own inefficiency or to the bankruptcy of his late employer. He would simply be required to be at the Labour Exchange, where he would either be provided with a job or found the means of improving his working capacity while he was waiting for a job. If it werediscovered by actual observation of the man's present behaviour that there was in him a grave moral defect not otherwise remediable, he would have to submit himself, in a detention colony, to a treatment which would be at once curative and deterrent in the old Poor Law sense. It is, in fact, exactly becauseit has been impossible to grapple with the moral factor by merely relieving destitution that experienced workers among the poor have turned away from the whole conception of a Poor Law and the relief of destitution, in favour of a systematic attempt to prevent the occurrence of destitution.
The Sphere of Voluntary Agencies in the Prevention of Destitution
Both the Majority Report and the Minority Report lay stress on the importance of enlisting the assistance of voluntary agencies and private charity in the task of dealing with destitution. Both schemes of reform allot a large and important sphere to these auxiliaries. But there is the widest possible difference, both in principle and in practicable applications, between the two proposals.
To the Majority what seems desirable is that the army of destitute persons needing assistance should be divided into two classes—those who can best be helped by private charity, and those for whom public assistance is most appropriate. These two classes should, it is asserted, be kept, from the outset, wholly separate, to be dealt with by two vertically co-ordinate authorities—the Public Assistance Committee, an official body, dispensing public funds, and the Voluntary Aid Committee, made up of voluntary charitable workers, dispensing private funds. Certain classes of applicants for assistance who come for the first time are to be required, whether they wish it or not, to be assigned to the Voluntary Aid Committee, which is to be free to deal with the cases as it chooses. Those only whom it refuses to aid, or refuses to continue to aid, are to be relegated to the Public Assistance Committee, which is to be bound to make its aid in some way "less eligible" than that which the Voluntary Aid Committee would have given.
The explanation of this remarkable proposal, with its assumed separation of the poor into what we may not unfairly call the sheep and the goats, lies in the fact that it is to private charity, organised in the Voluntary Aid Committee, that the Majority Commissioners look for what they call "preventive work." But this is to use the word "preventive" as meaning, not in the least what the Minority Commissioners mean by that term, but merely the saving of selected persons from the stigma of pauperism and from the assumedly unsatisfactory method of treatment by the Public Authority. This difference in the use of the word "prevent" runs through all the arguments and proposals of the two Reports, and explains many of the divergencies between their specific recommendations. When the word "prevention" is used in the Majority Report it nearly always means the prevention of pauperism; whenever it is used in the Minority Report it invariably means the prevention of destitution.
The Minority Commissioners dissent emphatically from the proposal to separate the poor into two classes, and to free the Public Authority from all responsibility for the treatment of the one, whilst excluding the voluntary workers from all share in the treatment of the other. Such a proposal has, among other objectionable features, the cardinal defect that it obscures the importance, and actually stands in the way of any effective measures for preventing the occurrence of destitution. It is always possible for Voluntary Agencies to save selected persons from pauperism; but such Agencies can seldom do anything to prevent, even in these selected persons, the occurrence of destitution. When a phthisical man, unable any longer to earn wages, is so far brought low as to apply for assistance, the Voluntary Aid Committee may help him to live, may procure him medical advice, may gain him admission to a Voluntary Sanatorium, if a vacancy can be found; and may, eventually, help his already infected family to bury him. But all this is "Early Victorian" in its conception. It belongs to the time when sickness had to be accepted as the "Visitation of God." The Voluntary Aid Committee, in thus preventing that man from becoming a pauper, will have done nothing towards preventing the destitution with which he has already been smitten before he comes to them, and will have accomplished nothingtowards saving others from succumbing in the same way. The destitution in this case might have been prevented if the Local Health Authority had pursued more energetically its campaign against preventable sickness; if it had so improved the environment as to bring sunshine and fresh air into the working-class street, and insisted on good sanitation of the dwelling-house; if it had "searched out" the case, so as to discover it long before application was made, when the disease was still in its incipient stage, before destitution had set in, and before the rest of the family was infected; if the patient had, at this early stage, been, by a short sojourn in the Municipal Infirmary, effectively taught how to live; if his home had then been kept under systematic observation; and if the National Labour Exchange had found him suitable outdoor employment. But these things are out of the reach of Voluntary Agencies, as they are beyond the ken of any Destitution Authority.
The Minority Commissioners assign to Voluntary Agencies quite a different sphere of activity—one, indeed, which the more progressive among them have already claimed as their own. The time has gone by when we can separate the poor into two classes, so as to confine the assistance of the Voluntary Agencies to one only of these classes, the smaller of the two, and so as to restrict their work to the relief of a destitution which has already occurred, instead of the more hopeful task of helping to prevent the very occurrence of destitution, by arresting its several causes. It is impossible in the twentieth century for the Local Authority to part with its responsibility as regards any of the inhabitants of its district; but, on the other hand, it is coming more and more clearly to be seen that it is impracticable for it to fulfil this responsibility except by the aid of a large number of volunteer workers. The modern relation between the public authority and the voluntary worker is one of systematically organised partnership under expert direction. Thus, according to the proposals of the Minority Report, every case requiring notice or action of any sort will be dealt with both by voluntary workers and by the public authority, each in its own appropriate sphere, and each according to its special opportunities. The children of the district will not be divided between a Voluntary AidCommittee and the Public Assistance Committee, some being dealt with wholly by the one and the rest wholly by the other. The Local Education Authority must remain wholly responsible for preventing any kind of neglect in all the children of the district; but we already see its work, in the most progressive districts, dependent for its success upon the co-operation of a whole series of School Managers and Children's Care Committees, Country Holiday Fund Committees and "Spectacle Committees," and Apprenticeship Committees and what not. The Local Health Authority cannot cede to any Voluntary Agencies its responsibilities for the maintenance in health of all the population of its district; but the Medical Officer of Health needs to recruit, and is, in scores of towns, already recruiting, a whole army of volunteers in the Health Visitors, the organisers of "Schools for Mothers," the nursing associations, the managers of convalescent homes, the "after-care" committees, the committees of voluntary institutions for cripples and epileptics, and so on. Even with regard to the newer public service in connection with mentally defective children, aged pensioners, or the unemployed, abundant use is already beginning to be made of the voluntary worker. The Minority Commissioners look, under their scheme, for an enormous extension of the sphere for volunteer work of this sort, organised in connection with one or other of the Committees of the County or Country Borough Council. Each Committee needs its own fringe of voluntary workers, who will act as its eyes and ears and fingers, in keeping touch with the huge masses of population with which it has to deal, and will enable it both to "search out" all the cases that need attention, irrespective of any application, and to invest the official machinery with that touch of personal interest and human sympathy which is so necessary for its successful working. And that fringe is already there. It is significant that the immediate result of the assumption by the London Education Authority of its new duties of feeding and medically inspecting the children of school age was the call, by the London County Council, for 7000 volunteers to fill its Children's Care Committees alone. The Minority Report involves, in short, vastly greater numbers of voluntary workers than does the Majority Report, and assigns to them both a more importantand a more hopeful sphere than the helping of particular individuals to "keep off the rates."[860]
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
We may now attempt to sum up the position as it presents itself, after the deliverance of the Royal Commission, to the statesman and to the public opinion of 1910.
There is first the chaos of authorities, the overlapping of functions and the duplication of services, resulting in the expenditure, out of rates and taxes in the United Kingdom, on the maintenance, schooling, and medical attendance of the poorer classes of nearly seventy millions sterling annually. During the past five years, even whilst the Royal Commission was sitting, this multiplication of overlapping authorities has proceeded at a great pace. In 1905 the Unemployed Workmen Act created a rival authority for relieving the able-bodied man. In 1906 the Education (Provision of Meals) Act, in 1907 the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, and in 1908 the Education (Scotland) Act and the Children Act, set up the Local Education Authority as a rival to the Poor Law Authority in regard to providing food, medical attendance, and all other necessaries for children found destitute at school. In 1908, too, the Old Age Pensions Act established a rival authority for the maintenance of the destitute aged. Meanwhile, the Local Health Authorities have been told to take over the destitute man who has phthisis, and to extend in many directions the range of their work; the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy has declared that a new authority must be found for the vagrants, and the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded has come to the very authoritative conclusion that all grades and kinds of mentally defective persons must be taken out of the Poor Law altogether. The result is that, already in 1910, the number of personsbeing actually fed at the public expense by the Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, the Local Lunacy Authorities, the Local Unemployment Authorities, and the Local Pension Authorities,exceeds, in the aggregate, the number of persons being fed by the Poor Law Authorities. For every separate section of the pauper host there are now at least two Public Authorities at work—sometimes three or four Public Authorities—with duplicated machinery, overlapping services, officers competing with each other on rival principles of action,in not a few cases simultaneously providing for the same persons without knowing of each other's work.
The Poor Law Authorities themselves, and the bulk of their work, the Royal Commission found extremely unsatisfactory, and are unanimous in condemning, not so much from any personal shortcomings of the 24,000 guardians as from the nature of the task to which they had been set. The assistance that they dispense, by its very nature, comes too late to be preventive of the occurrence of destitution, and, in the majority of cases, too late to be curative. Whatever may be decided as to its successor, it is clear that the existing Poor Law system, and the existing Poor Law Authority, must, to use the expressive words of Mr. Balfour's election address, be "scrapped."
The Majority Commissioners hold, on the assumption that every case of pauperism implies a moral defect, that there should be, in each locality, one Authority and only one Authority to deal with persons requiring maintenance from public funds. They, therefore, recommend the establishment of a new "Destitution Authority" to deal only with persons who are destitute, and only when they are destitute; and for such persons to provide, from birth to burial, in distinctively Poor Law Institutions, or under distinctively Poor Law officials, all that is required. It is admitted that this involves the repeal of the Unemployed Workmen Act and the Education (Provision of Meals) Act. We must leave politicians to judge whether it is practicable to thrust the unemployed workman, and the child found hungry at school, back into the Poor Law, even if the Poor Law is called by another name. But even if this were done, the Majority Report would still leave the overlap as regards the destitute aged which is involved in the Old Age Pensions Act; theoverlap as regards the destitute sick which is involved in the evergrowing activities of the 700 rate-maintained municipal hospitals of the Local Health Authorities; the overlap with regard to destitute children which is involved by the activities of the Local Education Authorities and the Home Office under the Industrial Schools Acts, and now under the Children Act. And the Majority Commissioners cannot, it appears, make up their minds[861]whether or not they wish the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-minded to be carried into law, and thus end the overlap between the Poor Law Authority and the Lunacy Authority.
The Majority Report purports to give the new "Public Assistance Authority" some guidance as to policy. It is to relieve none but those at present entitled to relief, and therefore, in all cases, to wait until destitution has set in. Thus the aid will, as now, come too late to prevent or to cure. On the other hand, the "deterrent" attitude of 1834 is to be given up; the workhouse is to be abolished; and "curative and restorative treatment," at home or in an appropriate institution, is to be afforded to every case. Yet in order to afford to certain classes of applicants methods of relief and treatment more suitable than any Public Assistance Authority is to be allowed to afford, a complete system of Voluntary Aid Committees is to be set up, and to such Committees these particular applicants are to be required to apply, whether or not they prefer charity to public aid.
Against these proposals of the Majority Report the Minority Commissioners protest that they will not put a stop to the calamitous and extravagant overlapping of services and duplication of work which now exists or to the demoralising chaos that prevails as to recovery of cost. Moreover, the Minority Commissioners hold that if the community restricts itself to relieving personsat the crisis of their destitution, and this is a necessary condition of any Poor Law, or of the action of any Destitution Authority, whatever its name, the community cannot, without grave financial danger, and still graver danger to character, depart from the principles of 1834. However unpopular may be the doctrine, it is still true that if destitute persons are to be given "curative and restorativetreatment" without deterrent conditions and without the stigma of pauperism, a constantly increasing number of persons will,unless they are in some way prevented from sinking into destitution, come in and out of the Poor Law as it suits their convenience, to their own grave demoralisation and at a ruinous cost to the nation. But the heart and conscience of the community will not tolerate the subjection of all the million paupers indiscriminately to deterrent conditions, especially as these have now been proved to be seriously detrimental in their effects. The whole phraseology of the Majority Report, and its proposals themselves, afford convincing testimony to the necessity of giving up the idea of a "deterrent" Poor Law. And the Majority Report gives us no substitute for this deterrence—unless, indeed, it can really be imagined that the operation of the Voluntary Aid Committees is somehow to protect us.
The only effective substitute for deterrence is, the Minority Commissioners suggest, the Principle of Prevention—prevention, that is, not merely of pauperism, but of the very occurrence of destitution. This negatives the very idea of a Destitution Authority, whatsoever its designation or its policy. It is in vain to hope that any Poor Law, or any Destitution Authority, however improved, can ever prevent or even diminish destitution; because, confined as it is to dealing with a destitution which has occurred, it is inherently precluded by its very nature from attacking any of the causes which produce the destitution that is perpetually coming on its hands. Thus, the twenty millions sterling now spent annually in the United Kingdom on the mere relief of destitution do practically nothing to prevent the creation, year by year, of new masses of destitution. Even the educational work which the Poor Law Authorities do for the Poor Law children is largely vitiated by their inherent disability to exercise any supervision over the life of the child before and after the crisis of destitution. The greater part of the expenditure on the Poor Law Medical Service is, so far as any gain to the health of the nation is concerned, wasted because no sick person can legally be treated in the incipient stage of his disease when it may still be curable; the Poor Law doctor must always wait until destitution has set in! This—sothe Minority Commissioners claim—must necessarily be the same in the case of the "Public Assistance Authority" proposed in the Majority Report, or, indeed, in the case of anybody set to administer a Poor Law. On the other hand, the fact that universal provision of some services to all persons, whether destitute or not, has been adopted by Parliament, has led to a duplication and confusions of functions between the old Poor Law Authority and the new Preventive Authorities. This daily-increasing overlap and duplication can only be ended by either stripping the new Preventive Authorities of functions entrusted to them within the last few years by Parliament—which is plainly impossible—or by abolishing the Poor Law. Hence the only safe, as well as the only advantageous way out of this confusion is to go forward on the Principle of Prevention. This Principle of Prevention may take the form, on the one hand, of altering the environment, on the other, of treating the individual. But if the cost of curative treatment, or even of altering the environment, is to be borne by the community, it is essential, on grounds of economy, that there should be a searching out of all incipient cases and such a disciplinary supervision as will prevent persons from becoming destitute through neglected infancy, neglected childhood, preventable illness, and voluntary unemployment.
In this disciplinary supervision over those who repeatedly fall into the morass of destitution, or who, by failing to fulfil their social obligations, show signs of entering upon the descent into that morass, we see a more humane, as well as a more effective form of "deterrence" than that of the 1834 Poor Law. The newer preventive authorities deter from falling into destitution, not by fear of what will happen when the fall has taken place, but by timely insistence on the performance of the social duties that will prevent the fall. The parents who, under the pressure of the Local Education Authority, are induced and compelled to send their children to school from 5 to 14 years of age are not only effectually "deterred" from living on their children's earnings, but are also prevented from so far neglecting their offspring as to fail to get them to school regularly and punctually, or to fail to maintain them in a state fit for admission to school, according to a standard that is constantly rising. In some districts theLocal Education Authority has even gone far, by means of inspection, instruction, exhortation, and, in the last resort, prosecution, towards effectually "deterring" parents from letting their children become verminous. Deterrent action of this kind by the Local Education Authority has been accompanied by corresponding action by the Local Health Authority, which has—again by inspection, instruction, exhortation, and, in the last resort, prosecution—induced many occupiers of tenement dwellings to prevent these from remaining verminous or otherwise grossly below the current standard of sanitation. This form of deterrence it is that lies at the base of all our Public Health and Factory Legislation; a deterrence that leads the owners and occupiers to bestir themselves to keep their dwellings up to the current local standard of healthiness, the occupiers of factories to maintain these in accordance with the requirements of the law, and the operatives in unhealthy trades to observe the precautions prescribed against disease. The same idea of a preventive deterrence will inspire the Local Lunacy Authorities, once they are made responsible for the feeble-minded, to insist on proper care and control for those helpless girl mothers whom the Poor Law must perforce leave free to propagate a feeble-minded race. In the same way the Minority Commissioners believe that the new National Authority for Unemployment, of which we may detect the beginnings in the National Labour Exchange, will be able to "deter" men from becoming unemployed, not only by actually preventing many unnecessary breaches of continuity in employment (by equalising, year by year, the aggregate demand for labour, regularising employment in the seasonal trades, and "decasualising" the casual labourer in the ways elaborately described in the Report), but also by putting the necessary pressure on the will of those who are "born tired" or who have become "unemployable," either to accept and retain the situations that will be definitely offered to them, or else to submit themselves to disciplinary training, with the reformatory Detention Colony in the background.
We venture to end this exposition of the philosophy of the Minority Report of 1909 by a repetition of the words that we used, perhaps prematurely, to describe those "Principles of 1907," to which, as we have demonstrated, three-quarters of a century of experience hasempirically brought the Local Government Board itself. These principles, we pointed out—in contrast to thelaisser faireof 1834—"embody the doctrine of a mutual obligation between the individual and the community. The universal maintenance of a definite minimum of civilised life—seem to be in the interest of the community no less than in that of the individual—becomes the joint responsibility of an indissoluble partnership. The community recognises a duty in the curative treatment of all who are in need of it—a duty most clearly seen in the medical treatment of the sick and the education of the children. Once this corporate responsibility is accepted, it becomes a question whether the universal provision of any necessary common service is not the most advantageous method of fulfilling such responsibility—a method which has, at any rate, the advantage of leaving unimpaired the salutary inequality between the thrifty and the unthrifty. It is, moreover, an inevitable complement of this corporate responsibility, and of the recognition of the indissoluble partnership, that new and enlarged obligations, unknown in a state oflaisser faire, are placed upon the individual—such as the obligation of the parent to keep his children in health, and to send them to school at the time and in the condition insisted upon; the obligation of the young person to be well conducted and to learn; the obligation of the adult not to infect his environment, and to submit when required to hospital treatment. To enforce these obligations—all new since 1834—upon the individual citizen, experience shows that some other pressure on his volition is required than merely leaving him alone. Hence the community, by the combination of the principles of Curative Treatment, Universal Provision and Compulsion, deliberately 'weights the alternatives,' in the guise of a series of experiments upon volition. The individual retains as much freedom of choice as—if not more than—he ever enjoyed before. But the father finds it made more easy for him to get his children educated, and made more disagreeable for him to neglect them. It is made more easy for the mother to keep her infants in health, and more disagreeable for her to let them die. The man suffering from disease finds it made more easy for him to get cured without infecting his neighbours, and more disagreeablefor him not to take all the necessary precautions. The labour exchanges and the farm colonies aim at making it more easy for the wage-earner to get a situation; perhaps the reformatory establishment, with powers of detention, is needed to make it more disagreeable for him not to accept and retain that situation." It is, in short, this doctrine of a mutual obligation—this fundamental principle that social health is not a matter for the individual alone, nor for the Government alone, but depends essentially on the joint responsibility of the individual and the community for the maintenance of a definite minimum of civilised life—that inspires every detail of the Minority Report.
MEMORANDUM BY THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD AS TO THE LOCAL AUTHORITIES FOR POOR LAW PURPOSES AND THE OUT-RELIEF ORDERS IN FORCE AT THE END OF THE YEARS 1847, 1871, 1906.
MEMORANDUM BY THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD AS TO THE LOCAL AUTHORITIES FOR POOR LAW PURPOSES AND THE OUT-RELIEF ORDERS IN FORCE AT THE END OF THE YEARS 1847, 1871, 1906.
The following table exhibits all the unions, incorporations, and separate parishes which existed for Poor Law purposes on the 31st December in the years 1847, 1871, and 1906 respectively. Where any such union, etc., did not exist at the end of 1847 or ceased to exist before the end of 1906 a note has been made in the margin showing, as nearly as the materials readily available will permit,[862]the position of the parishes comprised in the union, etc., with respect to the Poor Law administration during the periods when the unions, etc., were non-existent.
The table shows the nature of the Poor Law (administrative) area at each of the three selected dates. The lettersS.P.indicate that at the relevant date the Poor Law area was a separate parish administered by a board of guardians under the Poor Law Acts Amendment Act 1834;L.P.that the area was a separate parish administered under the provisions of a Local Act;G.L.that the area was an incorporation formed under Gilbert's Act (22 Geo. 3 c. 83);L.I.that the area was an incorporation formed under a Local Act. The letterUindicates that at the relevant date the Poor Law area was a union formed under the Act of 1834, though before or after that date the area was of another nature, as indicated. Where no letters in heavy type are inserted, the Poor Law area was formed as a union under the Act of 1834, and no change in its nature had taken place.
The table shows whether an Outdoor Relief Prohibitory, Outdoor Labour Test, or Outdoor Relief Regulation Order was in force in each of the unions, etc., at the selected dates. The letter P indicates that at the relevant date a Prohibitory Order was in force; T, that an Outdoor Labour Test Order was so in force; and R, that a Regulation Order was soin force. In some cases it is difficult for various reasons to state positively whether a Prohibitory, Test, or Regulation Order was in force. Such cases have been marked with a "?"
In a few cases (distinguished in the table by the letter C) there were in force, at the end of 1847, regulations in regard to a labour test for outdoor paupers, which are set out in the Appendix at the end of the table.
In the cases of Nottingham and St. Pancras the outdoor relief regulations at the end of 1847 were in special terms. These regulations are set out in the Appendix.
It is to be noted that at the end of 1847, about 220 separate parishes (principally in the North of England, about 150 being in the West Riding of Yorkshire) were still outside any incorporation or union, and were managed under the provisions of 43 Eliz. c. 2. At 1871 these parishes had nearly all been included in various unions, only the four Inns of Court[863]and the Charterhouse remaining. In 1877 the Charterhouse was added to Holborn Union.
Local Government Board, S.W.10th May 1907.
Local Government Board, S.W.10th May 1907.