cruel system may have been necessary. It was intensely unpopular, but it undoubtedly reformed great evils and arrested a disease which might have proved fatal to the moral health of the community.

But its peculiar work is done. Two generations of severity have burnt the disgrace of pauperism into the hearts of the poor. The time is long forgotten when the agricultural laborer demanded out-relief as a regular supplement to his wages; when working class people who brought up families without assistance from the rates were recorded and even rewarded as persons of exceptional merit. Instead of this, a tradition of shame and degradation and disgust has become so firmly established that the poor frequently prefer actual death by starvation to the bare, but real, comfort of the modern workhouse.

The new school carried its principle to an absurd length. Its adherents honestly believed that agricultural laborers on shillings a week should be encouraged to spare, from the support of their families, sufficient to endow their own old age, and that they ought to be discouraged from early marriages and large families. The able men who designed and administered the new poor law were clever enough to discover that pauperism was not due to overpopulation, but the Malthusian spectre oppressed the thoughts of most intelligent people of the Mid-Victorian period. Hence followed two inferences which in course of time became dogmas.

The first was that the workhouse must not be made too comfortable, nor out-relief given too freely even to the old, lest the workers be weakened in the practice of that rigid thrift by which alone their independence in old age could-it was vainly hoped-be secured. Moreover, economy in public money was the great Liberal doctrine. Retrenchment came second to peace and before reform. Expenditure under the old poor law was undoubtedly far too lavish, and he was esteemed the virtuous guardian who withstood all temptation to sanction indulgences which meant money from the rates, and the supposed demoralization of the working classes. The Charity Organization Society arose to crystallize this inference into adamantine maxims, and to enforce it at innumerable conferences. What wonder that the average guardian was gradually drilled into a system under which the aged had to choose between starvation on half a crown a week out-relief and the penal servitude of the workhouse; that the children were cooped up within the workhouse itself or herded in barrack schools, and driven to start in life with the minimum of general education and no training for anything save the lowest grades of unskilled labor.

Secondly, it was believed that in the multitude of children there was social danger, and also, an idea yet more strange and baseless, that the unskilled and uneducated laborers would marry earlier and breed more recklessly if they were assured that the poor law would make a liberal provision for their children in case of the illness or death of the father. Late marriages, few children, and constant

*

Nicholls' History of the Poor Law. Vol. III. By T. Mackay. Chapter IX.

saving; teetotalism, regular attendance at church or chapel, and a steady refusal to waste time and energy on political agitation or trade unionism and the strikes it was believed to promote, these (together with a cheerful acquiescence in such wages as it pleased the employers to pay), all blended and suffused with the roseate blessings of free trade (in labor as well as goods), were confidently believed by well-meaning middle class reformers to be certain to secure for every laborer an honest "village blacksmith" life of steady work and a happy Darby and Joan, rose-covered-cottage old age.

Lastly, the distinction now universally recognized between the pauper and the temporarily unemployed worker was unknown, forgotten, or ignored. Thanks to the teaching of Marx, it is now admitted that unemployment, sometimes caused by trade depression and always accompanying changes in industry, is a chronic, though, perhaps, slowly diminishing social disease; that it is really different in character from permanent pauperism; and that its remedy is neither to degrade the unemployed mentally and physically by idleless and starvation, nor to drive them into demoralizing association with the pauper class, and into unwholesome familiarity with the meagre methods of outdoor and indoor poor relief.

The period of triumphant individualism was short lived. Its theories did not correspond with facts. The expected millennium came, perhaps, to the capitalists, but by no means to the workers. The spirit of protest awakened by Robert Owen; voiced by Dickens and Maurice and Kingsley; revived, when almost silenced, by the Socialists of our own day, has at last defeated and almost destroyed the hard doctrinaire individualism which once seemed so complacently invincible. In recent years public opinion, under the guidance of accepted authorities, has undergone a total change, and a fourth idea is now dominant.

4. COMMUNAL PROVISION ADAPTED TO SPECIAL NEEDS.

That saving is an impossible panacea for the old age poverty of the veterans of labor has been admitted almost without a dissenting voice by the House of Commons and by all political parties, who are pledged to old age pensions at the earliest possible date. And in this, England is but following the example of more progressive countries. As for children, their lack and not their superabundance is what is now deplored; and it is beginning to be recognized that the true interests of the State require us to provide the best possible upbringing and education for those children for whom the State is the official foster-parent.

Finally, the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905 clearly endorses the principle that the poor law is not a proper remedy for the evils of unemployment, and has created machinery by which an attempt is for the first time, made to assist unemployed workmen without connecting them with the disgraceful associations and disabilities of the poor law. The dominant idea now is communal provision for every class according to its needs. But the evil traditions of 1834 still widely prevail amongst guardians, and are upheld by a small

but influential clique who still actually style themselves the reform party!

Reorganization of the machinery of the poor law is necessary for many reasons, but perhaps the chief is that here indicated. We want a poor law revolution in order to make a clean sweep of the out of date ideas which still dominate too many of our guardians. We want, in fact, to adopt

The New Broom Method.

Local government in England is often old-fashioned, but seldom venerable. Some sentiment attaches to our ancient municipal corporations, and to parishes with memorials dating from the middle ages, but the whole complex system of urban and rural district councils and metropolitan boroughs, and, above all, of poor law unions with their undignified officials and their barrack-workhouses, is estimable only in so far as it is useful.

Now recent experience has shown that the old adage, “The new broom sweeps clean," has a very real application to the machinery of local government. Bodies like vestries and boards of guardians acquire ugly vices with age, and their evil habits, their anti-social traditions, become uneradicable. It was not entirely superior virtue or greater ability in the county and borough councils that rendered their substitution for the old school boards so beneficent a revolution. It was due in part to the revolution itself: the mere break in tradition the substitution of a new set of persons, new officials, new methods, for the ancient fossilized routine. The turning of the old London vestries into metropolitan boroughs, in many cases a change of name with scarcely an alteration in function, has proved a thorough justification of this revolutionary proposal. It is not perhaps practicable to enact that every local authority shall be re-named and reconstituted at intervals of thirty years, in order that it may be obliged to reconstruct its routine and begin a new tradition on up-todate lines. But, at any rate, it may be laid down as a general rule that there is a presumption against the efficiency and modernity of any piece of government machinery which has run without complete overhauling for more than a generation.

Now of all the departments of local government that need overhauling, the poor law is undeniably the worst. Some seventy years have passed since the boards of guardians as we now know them were constituted. For good and sufficient reasons their vitality was sapped from the first by the rigid control of the central government. A sickly and unpopular youth has led to an untimely old age which is neither wise nor venerable. The guardians of the poor, in their function as guardians, are hated by the poor and disliked by the rich. Their duties are the wholly benevolent ones of providing for those unfortunates who cannot look after themselves. But however the individuals may be esteemed, the institution is disliked and distrusted by the class it is designed to benefit, and by all other classes as well. It is clearly time that the ancient fabric of the poor law should be handed over to the house-breakers.

Shall the Guardians be Abolished?

A revolution such as we contemplate does not necessarily mean the abolition of the guardians. A large part of the changes which have transformed English local government have taken the form of reconstruction and the giving of fresh life to antiquated organizations. But there are many reasons, both general and special, why the whole machinery of the poor law as it stands at present should be thrown out on the political scrap-heap.

"Ad Hoc " Election.

In the first place it is now generally admitted that the principle of electing persons for a particular function is a bad one. The business of the elected person is not any speciality, but administration. In practice it is found that the average competent man or woman of affairs, the prominent citizen with wide general experience of life, administers all and any departments of government better than the amateur expert, too often a crank or a doctrinaire dogmatist, who gets himself elected to a body (such as the departed school boards or the still surviving boards of guardians) which is concerned, in the main, with only one department of administration. Experts are excellent advisers but prejudiced and partial judges. Specialists make good servants but bad masters. The elected person, who acts as master, should sit in judgment on the plans and proposals of his officers, and should check the theories of the enthusiast with the wider outlook of the plain man.

Next there is the existing

Confusion of Areas.

Nothing is more repellent to the ordinary citizen, anxious to understand and participate in his local affairs, than the hideous confusion of areas which prevails over large districts, chiefly owing to the disconnection between the union and the other departments of local government. Apart from the poor law, our system of parish, district, borough, and county councils is now fairly simple. Cutting into and across this system come the poor law unions, lumping together portions of a county borough with a rural district from which they are otherwise wholly distinct, and carrying on their own activities without relation to the parishes of which they are composed or the counties and boroughs of which they form a part. How can the busy citizen be expected to concern himself in the election of a body of whose area he is probably ignorant, and whose business is almost entirely the care of the poor, a class in which he hopes and believes that he will never have any direct personal interest? The result is the

Decay of Elections.

Over the general policy of the guardians of the poor no political controversies rise in any sense equivalent to those which usually distinguish liberals, conservatives and socialists, and, in the town and county council elections, the progressive or labor party and the

moderates or conservatives. In the case of the guardians there is very rarely any general difference of policy between any two sections of the community. All electors agree that the poor must be looked after with humanity and care, and that everything possible must be done for their benefit consistent with a due regard for the pockets of the ratepayers. The few debateable questions of poor law administration, turning mainly on the freedom with which outdoor relief is given, are too abstruse to interest the average elector. Hence in the elections of poor law guardians one of three things happens.

Either the election is used as an occasion for the recognized political parties to practise their electoral machinery and to test their strength. The liberals, conservatives, and, perhaps, labor men or socialists, put up candidates with programs practically indistinguishable, and seek to win a victory for free trade, or protection, or labor or socialism, as the case may be. In their place such contests are important, but they do not in practice appreciably affect the administration of the poor law.

Or, secondly, the election may be fought out on personal lines: for some private reason Mr. A attempts to win a seat at the expense of Mr. B. But most commonly the election is a farce. No one knows of or heeds the dates announced, except the sitting member and one or two local wire-pullers. Either the retiring member is reelected, or else somebody is selected to succeed him, who alone is nominated. Not one elector in 500 is aware that the signature of one or two papers has resulted in the appointment of a guardian of the poor for the next three years.

In London, for example, from particulars given in the Charity Organization Review for October, 1905, we learn that in the 1904 election, in 27 out of the 31 unions for which returns were obtained, 122 wards were contested, and in 115 there was no contest at all. In the contested wards less than one-fourth of the electors went to the poll. Assuming that the unsuccessful candidates polled nearly half the votes cast, we may say that the guardians of London were chosen by some 6 per cent. of the electorate. This is popular election reduced to a farce. Nevertheless the London guardians deal with more important business than any in the country.

Old Age Pensions.

Another special reason for the abolition of the guardians and of the distinctive character of the poor law will arise whenever an attempt is made to prepare a practical Old Age Pensions Bill. Parliament in England, when it faces the question, will legislate on the lines already adopted wherever old age pensions are now the law, that is, it will award the pensions to those who need them, and can make good use of them, and to no others. It may be assumed, therefore, that any Bill must proceed on the lines of the House of Commons Committee Report of 1899 and of the New Zealand pensions law, and not on the lines of absolutely universal pensions promoted by Mr. Charles Booth and others. When it is recollected that in quite round figures the former project will cost at first