THE LESSON OF FARNHAM.
THE true lesson of this Farnham Workhouse story, which for the past fortnight has interested and horrified all England, is, we greatly fear, that our " institutions " are ceasing to be alive. It would be difficult to conceive a case in which they were more perfect, or might have been expected to work more perfectly. Everything in con- nection with the Farnham Union was arranged on the strictly English plan. There was the Workhouse itself, with its staff of paid officials, supposed to be selected with some care, and, indeed, selected with some care, or they could not have concealed the truth so long. There was the " local " authority, a Board or Council of Elders, interested in the dis- trict, familiar with the villagers, invested with authority fully sufficient to remove any decided abuses. This Board was not a dead Board, by any means, on the contrary, it contained some decidedly competent persons, and many persons who ought to have been competent, people who really knew every applicant for relief, who would have helped the poor heartily in their own cottages, who, had they realized the miseries of the infirmary, would have remedied them, in spite of all the centralization in the world. Outside Board and " House " was the doctor, scientific person, paid, without the slightest interest in keeping people ill, and with a decided interest in a reputation for kindness and attention to the poor. Above and beyond all these, Board, scientific person, and house officials, was the Inspector, salaried official, with no local interest, with keen eyes, with a distinct desire to see and report, one would think, whatever there was to be seen and to be reported. Mere curiosity, the editorial instinct for publishing, would, one would imazine, have secured that much, more especially as any reports•likely to be disagreeable might have been marked "confidential," and have thereby been sealed up like the private letters sent by "own correspondents" to their employers, about which there has not been a breach of confidence for thirty years. And finally, above all, Inspector, Board, scientific person, and house officials, was the Department, responsible to Parlia- ment, able, active, and interested, for its own sake as well as that of the poor, in knowing the whole truth. Well, all that carefully constructed organization, that scientific hierarchy of officials, that exquisitely balanced combination of "central" supervision and " local " initiative, utterly and hopelessly failed. A professional journal, remarkable among journals only for its bitter prejudices, its unflinching honesty, and a genuine care for human beings—we have known the Lancet hit savagely hard in the interests of humanity when its pro- fessional interests required palliative articles—sends down a competent person with instructions to tell the truth, as far as he can see it, and the system at once explodes, is pronounced by all decent and efficient persons in England a sham and a delusion, productive only of disappointment and misery. Of course there is to be an official "inquiry" made, it is said with closed doors, by the Inspector most in fault, and we may have either a formal defence, or a formal acknowledgment that "there is much to be regretted," or even—such things have been—a formal endorsement of the whole complaint, with com- ments bitter as comments only can be when they express the repressed philanthropy of years. But nobody in his heart expects that the Lancet's Report will be seriously impugned. This or that trifling detail may be amended, this or that statement toned down, but everybody knows,—Lord Devon knows, just as well as the Times, and is just as much con- vinced, —that the Lancet has told the truth, on the whole ; that there are no night nurses in the infirmary ; that the water-closets are infamous, usually outside, always too few, always dirty, and—yes, by Heaven we shall quote that statement, let our readers murmur as they like—always without paper ; that in the tramp wards men are locked up without food, and a woman in labour without attendance ; that sick old women are fed on stuff a dog would hardly eat, though ordered nourishing diet ; that the children "have no toys, no amusement, and no education ;" that the Master took away a few newspapers given to the very aged ; that the inmates of the able-bodied ward, all infirm except four, are locked up at night without bell or water-closet ; that—but why should we go on I—that Farnham Union, in short, was a place which justified instant lynching of officials, and in any other country than England would have evoked that harsh but complete corrective. The whole country, of course, is shocked ; but under the existing system there is and can be little help. We may get a better Master of the workhouse, indeed we have got one, but the machinery which is to watch him can hardly be put in better order. Mr. Charles Villiers was a lazy man, though an able one, Mr. Hardy could be as obstinate as if he had been bred in a bureau, and Lord Devon has been too often a Railway Chairman ; but either of them would, as far as he was personally con- cerned, have remedied evils like these to the utmost of his power. Either would, we have not a doubt, have resisted cruelty to the paupers, had he clearly realized it, as he would have resisted cruelty to his tenantry or servants. The Inspector was probably about as efficient as inspectors ever are ; that is, he was willing and able to tell the whole truth when specially urged, but otherwise chiefly solicitous not to raise prejudice in the minds either of the department or of the local gentry. The doctor did his poor best very heartily, and often remedied small abuses, and the Board sometimes sup- ported him, and showed no exceptional want of sympathy or kindness. The Master was bad, no doubt, but then his bad- ness was precisely the point which this organization was created to reveal, and failed to reveal, though the private Inspector revealed it in a day. What security, then, have we that the infirmaries of country workhouses are in any better condition ?—that of the 830,000 persons now in receipt of poor relief all the aged, sick, infirm, and helpless are not con- demned to live under conditions such as the Lancet has revealed, conditions which are only not torture because their victims are hardly civilized enough to feel them as such ? There is no security whatever, on the contrary, there is the gravest reason to believe that other workhouses are in a still worse state; that revelations still more shocking will shortly appear ; that even in London the new Act is a failure ; that the Poor Law organization does not anywhere secure its first object—decent provision for those who, from age, sickness, and poverty, can secure no provision for them- selves. In other words, every householder in England is heavily taxed in order to secure endurable conditions of life for an army of some 400,000 helpless unfortunates, and the money is so applied that he does not secure it.
What is the remedy ? The mind is baffled by a failure so complete, a call so urgent to carve distinct lines upon wood so obviously rotten. Suppose Parliament decides on scientific administration, where is the proof that official management will be more efficient than local ? Very often it is not, and in this very case the person most to blame is the Inspector, who represents the scientific administration to which many of us look as the ultimate panacea. Why should he do better when invested with full power of acting, than he does while invested with full power of reporting? And if he does not do better, the more power we give him the more will mis- management be concealed. Or, on the other hand, suppose we improve the local element by paying the Chairman of Guardians—a measure we could easily carry—or entrusting the " House " to masters of higher grade, what sound reason for hope of improvement ? The Chairman will be no better than another Inspector, will indeed be worse, for he has to live among the men whom his reports and officiousness will offend. The professional master will not necessarily be better than the professional guardian who has done nothing, or the professional inspector who has tolerated his doing it. If we cannot get men to do the work they pledge themselves to do, if servants of the State are always worse instead of better than the servants of mercantile firms, what is the use of any change of organization ? If officers think it their business to run away, the names of their grades matter very little. As things stand, government in all depart- ments which are at once centralized and local has been vir- tually transferred to editors, and, as the Pall Mall Gazette has pointed out before us, no official does anything till some news- paper proprietor spends cash in trying to make out what is wrong. Monstrous as the assertion may seem, it has yet only too much truth, that if half-a-dozen newspapers were suppressed to-morrow, government in its true sense would in England almost cease to exist. Not only would every man do what seemed right in his own eyes, but the one thing that would seem right would be to sit still. The disease which destroys Empires, the paralysis of the sense of Official duty, has got among us, and the machine moves as if it were in the hands of Spaniards, Neapolitans, or Chinese, men on whom the wisest laws, the most scientific arrangements are lost, because no human being can be trusted to keep them steadily at work. Let that disease once get the mastery of us, let it once become the official habit to do no duty save under compulsion, and the State must either cease to exist like Spain, or submit as France did in 1793 to the actual cautery, a remedy almost worse than the evil which it removes. We warn the House of Commons, the ultimate Government, that things will not be allowed, in England, to go thus far ; that if it will not by a salutary rigour, by a healthy courage in innovation, rebrace the relaxed fibre of official life, powers other than itself will make and Succeed in the attempt. A scorn of the feebleness of Parliament, its laxity, its total inability to secure the actual doing of anything, from the reorganization of the Army to the clearing of the Ornamental Water in Regent's Park—which has taken just twelve months in beginning—is spreading like a miasma, till it has infected half the political class ; and if it ever descends to the people, the power of Parliament and half the freedom of England will disappear together. The journalists are wearying already, and the people will weary soon, of the eternal use of the spur. We have wandered far from Farnham,—but what help ? What is the use of suggestions, when the plans suggested all require the aid of men filled with a sense of duty to the State, and when such men are not to be found ? Had there been one man in all that Farnham hierarchy, only one man, who did his duty as unflinchingly as the Lancet reporter, all would have been right ; and what organization ever worked, or will work, or can work, without one such man ? As to mere organiza- tion, the remedy we have a hundred times suggested would, we continue to believe, if we could get the men, remove almost every evil of the existing system. The Union Work- houses should become vast hospitals, in which the aged, the sick, and the orphan might dwell in frugal but decent comfort, under the rule of men like those who govern the great hospitals of London, and who do not fail like Poor Law officials, while the ablebodied should be relieved at home, not by alms, but by work on the lowest endurable scale of wages. But then that reform, like every other, demands men who can be trusted without a thousand checks, and to judge from every appearance in every department of society, England is ceasing to produce the breed.
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