HOW TO HELP THE POOR.
As winter approaches, with its harder living, cost of coals, and other troubles for the indigent, the "crime" which arises from misery begins to multiply, Police Magistrates become active dis- pensers of charity, and newspaper-writers discuss the social evils that lead to such phaenomena. As, too, an intense dearth of political subjects usually sets in at the season of pheasant-shooting, this sort of grievance is opportune. There is a kind of preserve of such game for the season ; for to discuss such matters without some instant exemplification would be too "abstract" and " unprac- tical "—just as absurd as it is for the physician to study the diag- nosis of a disease before he has a patient sick of it. Any groom can tell you, that the proper time to shut the stable-door is when the horse is stolen. It is well that the more wealthy and powerful classes are induced at any time to think of the very poor and their wretchedness ; but as people avert their regard from such matters except at critical times, it is not surprising that they take partial, if not heated views. The immediate thing that has attracted notice is the case of some women who are in the habit of working for slopsellers and the dealers of cheap clothing; who obtain most miserable pay—at such rates, that working eighteen hours only enables them to earn sixpence ! and who have a practice of pawning the work intrusted to them. The way in which this disclosure is received is remarkable. One set of philan- thropists, shocked at such "slavery," denounce the employers of the miserable people, and so reprobate the system of cheap cloth- ing, as almost to come to the conclusion that nobody ought to sell it, and nobody buy it. A very little reflection suggests, that if people were to abstain from cheap clothing and buy only dear, the miserable class of workers would be little benefited ; for the em- ployment would be transferred from them to another class of work- people : the difference to them would be, that instead of working eighteen hours a day for sixpence, they would not work at all, and would get nothing. If it be urged, indeed, that this would be a lesser evil ; that the present amount of pauperism, which is dis- guised but not extinguished by a pretence of employment and wages, bad better be exposed in its nakedness, to be dealt with more thoroughly; that idleness with beggary is better than indus- try on such terms,—on very broad grounds, the position might be maintained. The general drift of the argument, however, seems to have in view some large scheme of charity—a good auxiliary pal- liative, but not a substantive cure. This particular evil, in fact, is only a symptom of a general social condition. There are too many people in the land for profitable employment, and therefore for comfortable subsistence ; and, like a short blanket, shift the work how you will, it will not cover all, but ever leaves some part naked, cold, and perish- ing. There is a reacting source of poverty : all classes struggle for a share of the blanket ; they will give any thing to obtain a scrap of the comfort; they pull and tear, and in grasping an in- effectual modicum for themselves, they spoil and diminish it for others: in the excessive struggle to obtain some employment, can- didates for it offer higher and higher terms—more and more work for less and less wages, more and more goods for less and less money. In this way again, they so diminish their own and each other's resources, that when they appear as buyers, it becomes matter of exceeding urgency with them to obtain what is necessary for their wants as cheaply as possible. Many persons, if they did not buy the half-dozen shilling or two-shilling cotton shirts, must have fewer. That emulation in the race for prosperity, which seemed a blessing, becomes a curse. Seeing that, and the shock- ing results, another class of philanthropists cry, Let us then have no competition—let us forefend it by means of " protection." These persons deprecate the intense striving and pushing which are the order of the day in all branches of industry ; and are dis- mayed to see the farmers, erst
"Mild Arcadians ever blooming, Nightly nodding o'er their flocks,"
now drawn into the general vortex of competition.
This remedy is worse than the other. Charity, it is true, can do little more than piece out the short blanket ; but destroy com- petition, and you destroy the system of which it is the life. Now, with all its evils, competition in some things does better than un- stimulated industry : it has enabled manufactures to support their section of the population so much better than agriculture has done, that there has been a constant migration from the agricultural to the manufacturing part of the country. Destroy competition and the work it makes, and you throw whole masses of the population into a state of absolute destitution. You cannot in humanity do it, until you have other means of feeding millions. Moreover, the ex- pedient is bad, because it is impracticable: there is no power on earth that can stop the march of competition. It is not merely from without that it acts, but within also : internal competition is the intensest. Agriculture has been protected from external com- petition, which has kept up the apparent prices of its produce— made its wares not cheap ; but it has suffered from the internal competition : in the eagerness to seize a share of that part of the blanket, rents have been offered higher and higher, until nearly the whole of the bit of blanket bought is confiscated under the name of rent, and the farmers are as bare as any. There was no show of competition as to prices—though even that was delusive—but there was competition as to rents. Add, that so far as it has been effi- cient, the want of the stimulus to competition has made the farmers unenterprising, unintelligent, helpless. Indeed, where two are competing, a third cannot sulkily abstain ; for if he does, he merely loses altogether. What "protection" it realized has not availed agri- culture to make it prosperous, but rather is its condition most dis- astrous of any ; and the efforts of the utmost ingenuity and pertina- city have after all failed to shield agriculture from the universal con- test. The rational course, then, is to strengthen it for the struggle. So it is with all classes. Not merely would it be perfectly im- possible to roll back the course of the world some century or two, to the days of traditionary bliss for the humbler classes ; but were it possible, our twenty-five millions could not be subsisted with the easy trade and customs of ELIZABETH'S time, or RICHARD the Second's, or EDWARD the Confessor's, or whatever may be the Arcadian sera of British rural felicity. Nations never begin to go back and fall upon old customs, until they decay; when they do seem to recur to stages that they have passed. As we cannot nul- lify competition, then let us use it in the best manner : let us turn the stream, that we cannot roll back upon its source, to a great me- chanical power, and use it to master itself. Strengthen the people for competition. Make it easier—make the operations of industry easier. Trade is the immediate aim and means of all industry ; make trade easier, freer—easier to get at, easier to work, more pro- ductive in proportion to the effort, by removing restrictions : let us have "free trade," which is nothing but the whole product of any industry whatsoever, without arbitrary abatement. Let the agri- cultural class be fairly brought to share the benefits of the compe- tition which it cannot avoid, at the same time that it is fortified to the task. One bad effect in competition, and especially in the competition of capital, is the accumulation of wealth in fewer hands; * so that, even if the blanket were big enough to cover all, many getting more than their share, the more are naked. Charity and such voluntary succours help to restore the balance : in that sense they cannot he too largely diffused. Vast are the set and formal chanties of this country ; but in those real charities which never assume the natne, which cannot be calculated because they are universal, this country is not so far in advance. For instance, let a man fall in the struggle of trade, and, hyaena-like, his fellows tear him to pieces : he is de- clared " bankrupt," or " pauper "; and all he has, and therefore too often all he is, is given up. There is no dallying, no delay: let the Lombard Street prince "stop payment" on Wednesday, on Thursday he is a beggar, and his friends know him not : let the petty tradesman of Tottenham Court Road be ruined, and presently he is competing with decrepit "light-porters," errand-men, and other competitors in over-stocked miscellaneous work, who are in or out of the workhouse as the chance may be. In Egypt, if we mistake not, in practice no man is made bankrupt ; but the in- solvent has time or even aid from his creditors. Compared with the wealth of the country, the monastic charities and largesses of nobles and gentry in the olden time of England must have been im- mense indeed. We now cast up our poor-rate and our public charity, and are frightened at our own munificence. It is a harshly- proclaimed maximum. All is strict, arithmetical, and hard. We preach to the poor man, who is too many for the work that offers, " independence " and " industry " and thrift ; and when it is hia turn to sink in one of the gaps in the field of lahour, we classify him as a "pauper," or return him in a census in a lump of" casual poor," who are driven from parish to parish as cheap as possible : but if you talk of opening the purse-strings, you are warned not to encourage mendicancy and depraved idleness. We have instructed the people so badly, that if we lend assistance the poor man grasps at that alone, and is content with abject beggary and depend- ence; or at least, we plead that depravity of popular morals to pro- tect our purse. We have suffered the true stimulants to independ- ence—innate energy, honesty, and hope—to languish ; and to grow up in their place, as substitutes, the wretched goads—fear and want. Our own bad teaching becomes a plea for disowning the claim of the poor and the helpless on our affectionate "the parish" is the changeling for brotherly love ; the precept to help one another is well nigh forgotten. Poor-law Commissioners may well enough discipline professed paupers : our brethren who stumble in the race of toil merit a freer helping hand. So it goes on, how- ever, until autumn comes : a few sickly ill-paid women die, or are put in prison for stealing; and then there is the periodical cry of "pro-
tection" and charity, and five-pound notes fly to Police-offices ; until again the weather grows warmer,—forgetting that under our
present system there never is enough for all, and that tire sun has no power to warm despair. Let the sluices of charity and kind comfort stand open in every part and at all seasons. The poor have a hard fate, that live during this competition-struggle of our day : let them be helped through it by the strong. But strengthen them to the fight—give them equal laws and needful instruction. The whole tendency of law-making as respects industry, with few exceptions, has been to protect the employer against the workman : let them be equal. Let the master and the man be equally free in mutual choice; let the man combine with his fellows as readily as the masters among themselves ; let the workman have holydays for pleasure as well as the master; culti- vate usages which give the workman a taste for leisure, instead of teaching him nothing on earth but " industry " ; teach him worldly knowlege, and help him, by convenient laws, to apply it, so that in the turmoil of competition he may best know how to help himself— enlarge his comprehension, quicken his intelligence, and fortify his will. At the same time, foster in him, and in all of us, more generous motives than mere thrift, other influences than mere com- mercial emulation, to act as a diversion and counterpoise. Let that go on as it must ; but let it not sway the world alone, as if it were the sole rule of good worldly living—the British savoir vivre. These things might be done, not suddenly, but by constantly aim- ing at them, without wasting our ingenuity and energies in try ing, like the lunatic, to roll back the world because the clock has out- run our notions, and without immolating cheap slopsellers to the manes of starved shirt-makers, not more the victims than the shirt- sellers and shirt-buyers are the creatures of a social system in which one ingredient is a working-class still suffered, by bad rule and bad economical laws, to be redundant, ignorant, and degraded.
If labour could be accumulated in fewer hands, it would; that is, if one man could do the labour of a thousand, he would: but physical causes inter- pose. Machinery tends to remove those physical impediments—it is a hybrid between labour and capital, and dues effect an accumulation of labour. There are no such physical impedimenta to the accumula ion of capital : the capitalist with 100,000/. makes the same rate of profit as the man with 101.: he accu- mulates yearly ten thousand times as much—draws to himself thousands of whole capitals of lesser men.
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