JUSTICE TO THE POOR.
" Be just, before you are generous."
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.
Sia—After an interval of some weeks, I again appear in your columns. 'Those weeks, however, have not been wasted, I trust, by those who take an interest in the Poor-law question. A winter of unusual severity has dawned upon us; and in addition to the dead weight of our own pauper population, we are threatened with heavy taxation to support the wants of Ireland—not to mention the deep forebodings which are heard from Paisley, and from the Western Highlands. England will bear the brunt of these accumulated misfortunes: to the more healthy and vigorous parts of the body politic do its diseased members look for sustenance, if not. for life.
Allow me, however, before I recur to the main question or points connected with it, to clear up several doubts, which have been suggested to the reades mind, I doubt not, by your able criticisms on my former letters.
My last sentence was—" Do not relieve all who ask, but give according to the rules of kindness; and let your practical principles of giving be those of Chris- tianity." How is this to be carried oat? Mainly in two ways. First, by the creation of a common fund or national assessment for the relief of the poor, to be gradually introduced, beginning with the Metropolis. Secondly, by placing no legal limit upon the discretion of those who administer it, either as to granting or refusal of relief. This is restoring to national charity the characteristics and principles of private almsgiving—the setting apart a fixed portion of our incomes for the purposes ef brotherly kindness, and distributing it to the most worthy. It presupposes the abolition of every restriction on the recipient as on the donor, and leaves both parties perfectly free agents. It implies a pensioning of the destitute aged and i
infirm: t takes away from the able-bodied labourer, certainly, his right (if that can fairly be called a right to which no duty attaches.) to enter the walls of the workhouse; but it gives him a moral claim upon the Indulgence of his fellow men, which, in deserving cases, I am bold eBough to think few would ever resist; and it gives it to him free from those vexatious restrictions as to time and place which encumber our present Poor-law. I contend, therefore, that such a system by no means presupposes refusal of relief to the able-bodied. " Work," according to the statute of Elizabeth, ought to be, as you ably urge, the test of destitution: granted. The pinch of the question, however, really is, what amount of work? la the rough justice of the stone-yard or oalturn-rooni, the pumping water from a deep well, or the monotonous labour of the tread-mill, to be offered to all? Is the strapping lass in rude health, and the delicate mother, perhaps just recovering from her confinement—the brawny beggar or sturdy rogue, and the ingenious mechanic—to be set to the same kind of employment? and is the same "tale of bricks" to be required from each? If so, I truly pity the poor. But such a system is not merely difficult, it is impossible. Inability to support himself by work is the poor man's plea for relief. The less work he can do, the greater his claim to charity. While, therefore, willingness to work oughtin all cases to be proved as far as is practicable, it unfortunately happens that the pau- per's claim increases in the same ratio as his ability to work decreases. to exact, therefore, the same amount of labour from all, would be a premium to tits strong and the idle a tyranny to the weak and the infirm. Thus early dolts discretion intervene—discretion the soul of benevolence, the prime-mover and vitti principle of real charity.
In a well-regulated workhouse, there might be three or four classes of labour,— first, penal labour; second, agricultural labour; third, trades or mechanical la- bour; fourth, schooling or intellectual labour. The paupers might be set to these tasks at the discretion of the Guardians, and the produce of their work sold for what it would bring in aid of the poor-rate. Those poor who preferred their homes to the public asylums, might be paid such wages as a combined considera- tion of their character and necessities should induce the Board to order. The penal labour might be reserved as a practical test, sufficient for every real pur- pose; and if the pauper were deemed incorrigible and guilty of a social offence m stubborn idleness, he should be dismissed by the Board, and his name entered in a register as an incorrigible vagrant, who had forfeited the rights of citizen- ship; or he might be handed over to be dealt with according to the rigour of the law. Either course has much reason in its favour.
That the "right to relief," as it is now exercised, sins on both sides of the straight and clear line of justice, must be admitted by all who have any practical acquaintance with the bearings of the subject. The stout girls brought before Alderman Humphery in the autumn, who made a parade of their shame, and rejected the hand of charity with scorn, are but too common specimens of the prostitute class who are so commonly the tenants of our workhouses. The other day, I was riding up the Union Poor-house, to which I attend as a Guardian; when I saw a female waiting at the door, whose dress might have proclaimed her to belong to what are called the respectable classes: it had neither the coarse homeliness of the attire of the working woman nor the tawdry finery of that unhappy class we call "unfortunate." She wore a veil, and a handsome shawl, apparently of the Paisley manufacture. I stopped to accost her; and in- quired if she wished to speak to the Master, the Matron, or any of the Workhouse inmates? With that brief and shamefaced kind of answer with which an awk- ward question is often put off, she said, the Master had gone to fetch the re- mainder of her things. My curiosity being excited, I inquired of the Master who "the lady" was. He told me, I confess to my utter astonishment, that "the lady" had been but lately an inmate of the Union, where she had been confined of an illegitimate child. This little episode over, she would return to her home. She was the daughter of a very small shopkeeper. "Having happened a mis- fortune," as the poor creatures simply express it, and thereby incurred the dis- pleasure of her parents, something to this effect may be supposed to have passed between the mother and her. "Well, mother, forgive me! at all events there is no call for me troubling father and you. The Union is bound to take care of me: I'll go in for my confinement, and come out again as soon as it is over." The plan is soon settled. The father and mother agree to it. Whatever severity may with justice be attributed to the discipline of the workhouse, it is generally admitted that-the hospital system is under proper superintendence: women in childbirth are attended with three times the amount of comfort they could command in the best labourers' cottages. Thesame human nature A./hi& so fallibly errs, is quick and acute enough to discern these advantages. The woman comes into the house, and departs with the burden of her shame. What happens? The same fatal fa- cility of entering the house is again abused: she who went out the mother of one, ere a short year has elapsed sometimes comes back about to become the mother of a second. A family follows—and then retribution. It is found easy to enter the union, buttlifficult under our present laws to provide for a bastard family. Let any one visit any of our large unions: I pity the man who can return from the ward in which the unhappy-mothers of bastard children live, without feelings akin to shame and to disgust. Amongst the hardened sinners whose prurient iMI1:10- nifty and indecent thoughts speak from their countenances, he will discern, with a bitter but unavailing regret, the vestiges of better feeling and gentler looks among the younger women. With regret, I say; because, in the midst of such contamination, it is little short of a miracle if they can escape the deadly conta- gion or avoid being carried headlong down the stream of crime and destruction. Nay, worse than this: in many instances, the system of classification being im- perfectly carried out,-.--there being only three wards for females, one for aged wo- rsen, a second for married, a third for single women,—the good and the bad cha- racters are huddled together in a manner the most promiscuous; and the work- bonse,instead of being what the theory of the new Poor-law supposes it to be, a place of discipline for the pauper, speedily degenerates into a moral pest-house.
'But if the right to relief be on the one hand a great evil, on account of the fa- cility with which the dissolute obtain-entrance into those union-houses, which, by a-sort of inconsistency most anomalous certainly, have the character of haif- asybsm half-prison, does it on the other hand protect the weak or helpless against the chill penury of uncared-for disease and the hand of premature death? Let the recent cases of" death by starvation," as they are in a somewhat inflated style called, answer that question. Allow me to take you to one with which I have been unusually attracted: it has not acquired that notice which it ought. I al- lude to the case of the orphans at Hull, Brian Feney and his sister. If aught should call for peculiar protection from the laws, and claim exemption from that system of social free trade of which it is the object ofa benevolent poor- law to remove the rudeness and to blunt the sting, it is the helpless condition of an orphan. Let me now explain the exact position of these two orphans. By the recent act of Parliament, they became irremoveable in the parish of Sculeoates, in the town of Hull. They had previously belonged to Beverley parish; from which, up to the passing of the late statute, they had been accustomed to receive fis. per week of relief. By their five years' residence in Hull, they were of course disentitled to this aid. An irremoveable pauper differs only from a settled pauper in two respects,—first, the privilege does not descend to children; secondly, it is a right which may be forfeited by absence and voluntary removal. These differen- ces, however, constitute obviously no ground for unjust rigour to the irremoveable poor. While Beverley was fighting with Sculcoates and Sculcoates disputing with Beverley, Brian Feney fell a victim to consumptive disease, aggravated by all the pangs of hunger—uncared for, unlamented: his death created a local sensation, but is now forgotten, in the din of business and commercial enterprise with which the thriving seaport of Hull ever resounds. His best epitaph is the artless evi- dence of his sister on the inquest—his young nurse in the day of wo and anguish, his comforter in the hour of disease and death. I give a short extract. "Ile was discharged as incurable from the Infirmary five or six months ago. We have been orphans ten months: my mother died first, and my father soon afterwards. When my Tether was ill, we had some relief from Beverley: after my father's death, five shillings a week was given for my brother: they ceased to pay that upwards of two months ago. I told the relieving-officer that we had neither father nor mother, and that my brother was in a dying state almost. He said he could not help it; he could not do anything for us. We have been without the means of buying food for three days together." But is this poor girl not to be believed ? 'Hear what a most respectable wit- ness, named Headland, says of her character. "He had known the sister of the deceased four mouths, and believed her to be a very credible, respectable, hard- working girl. The kind of shoe-binding she did paid very poorly indeed. She would only get from lid. to 2d. per pair for the shoes she bound: she would have to work very hard indeed to earn from Is. 9d. to 2s. a week. She had also often been obliged to send back work unfinished, on account of the attention her brother required."
La Mayeux, in the Jail Errant, give us anything more touching than this simple page of the annals of the poor? And yet Susan Feney starves un- der our present system of Poor-laws, while the professed beggar and the prosti- tutelatten on the public benevolence! :Surely there is something very wrong here.
I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, A GUARDIAN.
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