At a meeting of the Royal Statistical Society on Tuesday
Mr. C. S. Loch read an interesting paper on the " Statistics of Population and Pauperism." The period taken was between 1861 and 1905. His main points were the importance of dividing pauper statistics into age groups and of securing a continuous age count, and the relation between pauperism and movements of population. We have not space to quote his figures, but roughly we may say that, while they show a. considerable general decline in the percentage of paupers of different ages to population since 1861, they show also within the last few years an increase in the proportion of middle-age and old-age pauperism. Mr. Loch was of opinion that this in- crease was due to the elaborate provision made recently for the feeding and shelter of the unemployed, especially in the Metropolis. In London the percentage of paupers over sixty to population had actually increased since 1861 from 16.46 to 17.39. The paper forms a timely warning against the false philanthropy in which we have been indulging of late. To put the matter brutally, we have been deliberately manu- facturing paupers, and unless we now reduce the " output " the whole nation will feel the consequences, moral and economic.
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