POOR-LAWS IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND.
A GENERAL Poor-law movement in all the Three Kingdoms seems to be threatened. Mr. Hume has appeared in a novercha- meter, as an opponent of the New Poor-law system. It is a striking event. That Joseph Hume, the embodiment of public thrift, of facts and figures, of utilitarian economy, should make a "pronunciamiento " against the Amended Poor-law, is the sign of some strong and stirring revulsion in the public mind. When the. Anti-Poor-law feeling has reached Joseph Hume, it must have attained a height indeed. He says that his dislike is to the men, not the measure : but that we take leave to consider an obvious mistake. We do not overlook the changes that have taken.place among the Poor-law
Commissioners ; but upon the whole the present Commission may be considered to represent the very authors of the measure, their interpretation of it may be accounted the most authentic, and thus their administration may be considered identical with the law. If Mr. Hume objects to the men and their execution of the statute, he need not scruple to carry his dislike to the act itself. And we suspect that a Parliamentary inquiry, resulting in a con- demnatory report, would acquit the Commissioners at the expense of the law. That law, however, cannot in any case be wholly condemned : the abuses of the previous system were flagrant, were of a nature to eat into the very vitals of society ; and merely to stop them was a most important service. Still, it does not always follow that the opposite of an abuse is the right thing the new Poor-law has done good work in stopping one sort of abuses ; but gratitude for that need not blind our eyes to its defects, productive or permissive of another sort of abuses. Even those who deferred, perhaps too implicitly, to the high authority of the economists with whom it originated, are bound by no statute of limitations against revising their opinion. The Irish Poor-law is an appendage to the English one, and a very imperfect appendage. It must therefore come under the same inquiry. That branch of the subject is full of difficulties— there would not be either sense or justice in the endeavour to conceal them but it must not be forgotten that the one enormous difficulty of giving a real Poor-law to Ireland is the very same thing as that which makes a poor-law yet more necessary for Ire- land than for England—the extent and degree of the destitution. The difficulty, therefore, is exactly of the kind not to daunt but to stimulate the exertion necessary for overcoming it. Ireland will never be tranquil without a complete poor-law. It might perhaps be a saving of time and labour if the same inr evitable inquiry were extended. to Scotland. There too the Poor: law has been "amended" ; but in such sort that Scotland is still without a poor-law worthy of the name. The Glasgow Argus re* ports a very ugly-looking case, which would be impossible under a real provision for the poor, however moderate. According to the story, which is partly based on official documents, the facts are these. John Malone, sixty-six years of age, has worked for the last twenty years in ;lie quarries at Rutherglen : he is a solitary man, his wife being dead, and his son living somewhere in America : John is afflicted with asthma, cough, an enlarged knee-joint, and a disease in one ankle ; and he is pronounced, in a medical certificate, to be quite unable to work. The man, thews fore, is destitute, superannuated, and impotent. He applied for parochial relief. The Inspector of the Poor at Rutherglen allowed him four shillings a month—little enough 1 But in England it will scarcely be credited, that, out of the four shillings, the In- spector kept back three shillings a month, to pay rent for a room occupied by Malone. So, for sustenance, the aged pauper is allowed something less than threepence a week,—a halfpenny a day, with nothing for Sundays or the odd days of the month I Malone appealed to the Board of Supervision at Edinburgh ; and he received this reply-
" Board of Supervision, Edinburgh. 26th June 1646.. "John Malone, Wm. Shield's Land, Back Row, Rutherglen.
"I am directed to inform you, that the Board of Supervision, having considered the application made by you, in which you complain that the relief afforded to you
is inadequate, decliaes to make any order in refs thereto.
" I am, &c. W. Ssrrrmm, See."
The respectable Whig paper of Glasgow from which we quote this wretched story makes a very just comment-
" The case of John Malone shows very clearly and very painfully that the amended Poor-law for Scotland must, before long, be amended again, and rendered a measure for the real and not the illusory relief of the poor. Under the very bad and inefficient poor-law of which the present act purports to be an amendment, John Malone, through the agency of the Court of Session, could have compelled the parish to grant him adequate relief. By the new law, the parish can NOT be compelled. The Sheriff, it is true, can compel parishes to grant some relief; bat he has no power to force them to make that relief adequate. One shilling a month for an afflicted and suffering creature, sixty-six years of age ! The case is dis- graceful; but, bad as it is, it forms only one out of many hundreds that continu- ally occur, to prove the necessity of a real reform of the whole system of poor-law relief in Scotland."
The state of the Poor-laws, then, is a crying grievance in the Three Kingdoms. There is more than the mere effete " Anti- Poor-law " agitation in the dislike to the English law : that was directed against the statute by anticipation and out of a sends. went; but the dislike to it, founded on experience of its working, is spreading among practical men of all parties. It was devised on the driest principles of political economy,—principles so drily and harshly asserted by its authors, that it was necessary to soften the enunciation to the public. If it had a leaning independently of its abstract theoretical construction, it was perhaps too much in favour of the employing classes. Many declare that no Poor- law can be introduced into Ireland, because the land cannot afford it : many assert as much for Scotland, because the occur pants of land will not tolerate a real poor-law. Thus we see two out of the Three Kingdoms with no provision for the destitute ; and in the third, a department of the Executive, set apart for dealing with the poor and pauperism, which is viewed with unr ceasing and increasing odium. What is or is not practicable for a poor-law ; what is property bound to do for poverty ; what ought peremptorily to be denied to the poor lest the larger interests of society should suffer ?—these are the questions uniformly invol- ved in the universal movement : the varying circumstances of the Three Kingdoms would, by the comparison, help to throw light upon the general subject ; and it would, we think, be both simpler and more practical to extend at least the first inquiry over whole United Kingdom.
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