MR. GOSCHEN ON THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND. T HE " weary
Titan" still staggers along, oppressed, it may be, by the "too vast orb of his fate," or it may also be by his own stupidity, but at least it is not for want of bit and sup that his strength is overborne. Mr. Goschen's lucid and forcible speech of Friday week will, we trust, remove some of that sense of nervous depression which every now and then saps English strength more seriously than sickness. A hundred symptoms show that the cycle of gloom which set in in 1866 with the fall of Overend, Gurney, and Co. is at length passing, has, indeed, almost passed away. The nation is again making money at an enormous rate, and driving every kind of decently secure investment up to unprecedented figures. Foreign Stocks, Indian Stocks, Home Railway Shares, all securities which are beyond the control of mere speculators and offer above four per cent. were never so dear ; risky loans for millions, like that loan for Peru, are taken with avidity ; the cup is getting full, and in all human pro- bability some new burst of speculation is at hand, which may take a beneficial form—for instance, we could get rid of a hundred millions in making cheap country railways with immense advantage—but will more probably turn out to be a mere method of depletion. However it goes, the country is once more getting rich, and the money is filtering downwards to the actual workers. The people, as Mr. Goschen showed by unimpugnable figures, are consuming more sugar, more tea, more beer, spirits, and tobacco, more in fact, of every kind of popular luxury, than ever. Their savings have also increased, while the exports of cotton, of wool, of linen, of iron, of machinery, have reached a figure wholly beyond precedent. By the testimony of all manner of men—Factory Inspectors, Poor-Law Inspectors, Members for great cities—the Lancashire trade, the silk trade, the flax- spinning trade, the lace trade, and above all, the iron trade, are all so flourishing that the want is not of work to be done, but of hands to do it. Even the iron shipbuilding trade, which was at so low a point, is reviving, and the only one believed to be still under serious depression is the building trade of London, which has, it is believed, been considerably overdone. So great is the demand for hands in some parts of the country, that Mr. Goschen believes that internal emigration would do more to help the people than emigration to America, while it is certain that no relief which can be afforded by the departure of a few workpeople is equal to the relief caused by the revival of any one great trade—relief, we must add, which would be more rapid and diffused if the Trades' Unions—in this one respect at least false to their central idea of the brotherhood of labour—were not so jealous of the intrusion of outsiders. There is hardly a trade into which a countryman of thirty, however clever, can enter at his own discretion—one of the many social disqualifications which press upon the agricultural labourer.
The picture thus drawn by Mr. Goschen, and truly drawn —for the President of the Poor-Law Board is a man who does not manipulate figures, but treats them with the reverence of the born statist—is a very pleasant one, especially to those who believe that wealth is the foundation of civilization ; but yet what a weary load it is that, according to the same speech, this country is carrying, and must carry There are 1,100.000 paupers on the books, and not a tenth of them will be taken off by any revival whatever, for not a tenth of them are workers. The rest are children-350,000 of them alone— widows, people past work, cripples, lunatics, incapables, human drift of one sort or another, the detritus of commerce and labour, a compost of suffering, helplessness, and disease. In addition to the burden of the State, in addition to the burden of the Debt, which we talk of as nothing, but without which England would be the least-taxed country in the world, this country has to maintain an army of incapables twice as numerous as the Armyof France, to feed, and clothe, and lodge and teach them,—an army which she cannot disband, and which she seems incompetent even to diminish. To talk of emigration, of enterprise, even of education, as reducing this burden, is almost waste of breath ; for cripples do not emigrate, the aged do not benefit by trade, when education is universal children must still be kept alive. While the Poor Law exists, with its fatal lesson that starvation is not the divinely-appointed penalty of idle- ness and unthrift, while the whole population is taught by the law, by the respectables, and by the clergy that it has a right to throw its relatives on the parish, any serious lifting of the burden would seem to be beyond human hope. We at least see none, save in such an alteration of the law as may once more permit the extinct virtues to develop themselves, such a return to stern principle as shall once more retone the national mind. We despise the Southern races for the way in which they tolerate mendicancy, but how are they worse than we, who give to every mendicant a legal right to a share in the income of the worker ? It is in this direction, in a solidification of flaccid opinion, that we see hope, and in this alone; not in an emigration which can but remove those who create wealth, leaving behind those who consume it ; not in any revival of trade, which will not diminish our burden, but only increase our capacity to bear it ; not in any social change, which cannot give health to the sick, or strength to the aged, or experience to childhood ; and even in this direction the hope we see is very slight. So firmly convinced are we of the evils of the Poor Law, that we believe its total extinction would cause less suffering and less evil than its continuance ; but no statesman in Parliament will risk soul as well as body upon that heroic remedy of despair. We would not risk it ourselves, even by irresponsible advice. The country can but go on endeavour- ing and endeavouring, if it may be, to reduce the burden by slow degrees. We may, if we have the courage and the energy, turn the Unions into hospitals, board out all children, till, sharing the lot of the workers, they may catch something of their readiness to toil ; refuse all relief save that of the hospital, and above all, leave the able-bodied poor to meet as the able-bodied above them do the pecuniary misfortunes of life. By the abolition of the legal right to relief, by the refusal of all relief out of doors, and by com- pelling children to acquire capacity to work, we may limit the evil, and only limit it. All these things will, we believe, be done in time ; but we regret the ever new questions which arise to delay the solution of this transcendent one. It is not Mr. Goschen's fault, or Mr. Gladstone's, and yet we confess to a disappointment that this Ministry has not shown more eager- ness to commence its greatest task, the campaign which it must wage against pauperism, against the popular readiness to plunder by a demand for alms. The conciliation of Ireland is a great task, and so is the organization of our administrative machinery ; but the extinction of pauperism is a greater still, so great that it visibly daunts even our present rulers, and makes optimists like ourselves, who hold that difficulties disappear as we advance, shrink from recommending the efforts which we yet know to be indispensable. Let ministers say and journalists write what they will of British prosperity, what is the use of it all while our labourers are housed like cattle, while our cities are pauper-warrens, without air, or light, or beauty, while a half of our people look to charity to main- tain them in old age, and while a million of human beings are only kept alive by compulsory deductions from the income of those who toil ?
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