MR. JOHN BURNS. T HE debate in the House of Commons
on Monday on the administration of the Poor Law gave Mr. John Burns a very useful opportunity of defending his conduct of one of the most important departments of the State. Of late years Mr. Burns has taken what some people might be tempted to describe as a back seat in the political world. Unlike certain other members of the Cabinet he has not made a point of always placing himself in the centre of the limelight. He has stuck to the department to which he was first appointed, and he has continued to administer that department in the spirit in which he started, without perpetually seeking to advertise himself or his performances. Nor has he, like so many of his col- leagues, obtained the personal advertisement which results from the bringing forward of contentious legislation. Except for an abortive Milk Bill, which the Government Whips have persistently shelved, there have been very few measures put forward by the Local Government Board. In such conditions as these that section of public opinion which depends upon the newspapers for its information is apt to ignore Mr. Burns's work, and to imagine that he no longer counts as a member of the Government. This is the penalty which conscientious workers have to pay for living in a newspaper age. Newspaper proprietors can only succeed by selling their papers, and by the nature of things a daily "news "-paper can only command a wide circulation so far as it contains news. The careful administration of a great Government department on well-thought-out principles provides no material for news. The problems to be dealt with involve an unending succession of small details which in themselves would never interest the public, and the collective importance of which can only be appre- ciated when the work of the department is examined over a long period. Therefore Mr. Burns must be content to forgo the ephemeral pleasure of daily publicity in order to build up, as we feel confident he is doing, a reputation that will outlast his own life.
Mr. Burns has also temporarily suffered from the fact that the lines upon which -he is administering his depart- ment are not such as to appeal to a sentimental public. At all times the instinct of the man in the street is to give immediate relief to every ease of real or plausibly pretended poverty without considering what the ultimate effect of the relief so given may be. Mr. Burns, on the other hand, has never forgotten that the permanent welfare of the community must be taken into account as well as the ' temporary needs of the individual. He has therefore sternly set his face against methods of Poor Law relief which would encourage instead of discouraging pauperism. In so doing he has run counter not only to the sentiment of a large number of Radicals but to the deliberate policy of the whole Socialist Party. The best illustration of the hopelessness of this policy of municipal or quasi-munieipar relief works is to be found in Hollesley Bay. From the very outset Mr. John Burns had the good sense to see that Hollesley Bay was bound to prove a failure, and he attacked this labour colony at a time when the House of Coranaons generally was inclined to back up this and other equally ill-considered schemes. In his speech on Monday he showed that up to a recent date this colony had cost no less than £160,000; that 7,000 men had passed through the colony ; and that, although the colony was expressly designed with a view to training men to work upon the land, only nineteen men apart from those emigrating had secured employment on the land. as a result of this vast expenditure of public money. It will be noticed that if each of the 17,000 men spent as much as six months in the colony — and probably many of them spent only a month the cost per man mould work out to considerably more than an agri- cultural labourer can earn in a year. Yet agricultural labourers are taxed to provide a portion of the cost of this wasteful experiment. In spite of such evidence as this some members of the House of Commons still continuo to talk in a vague way about the necessity of setting up labour colonies. Mr. John Burns has taken the trouble • to examine labour colonies in other countries as well as in England, and he states roundly that every labour colony he has visited in America and in Europe is a failure. That statement, no doubt, requires to be examined critically, for it may be that though no labour colonies are able to point to the reclamation of persons who have passed through them, yet it is conceivable that a labour colony may do useful work as a quasi-penal institution in cases of men who could not fairly be com- mitted to an ordinary prison. This is an aspect of the problem of unemployment to which Mr. John Burns has not yet paid sufficient attention. With his instincts of liberty, which every one must respect, he has set his face against all proposals to put habitual loafers under restraint. We think he is wrong. If the habitual loafer could be isolated he would do no harm to any one but himself, but HO long as he is left free to wander at his will he does infinite mischief. On the one hand, he diverts into a wrong channel the generosity of numbers of kind-hearted people ; on the other, he deters other equally kind-hearted but more cautious people from giving generously where generosity would be justified because they or their friends have suffered from his dishonesty. There is no greater enemy of the honest poor than the dishonest loafer, and we therefore strongly urge on Mr. Burns the desir- ability of revising his views of this aspect of the question and boldly advocating some system of semi-penal treat- ment for the habitual loafer. Ho has already to his credit taken a step which may lead in this direction by unifying to a certain extent the administration of casual wards in the metropolis. By this means precise information can be obtained upon which to base future legislation. Of the general results of Mr. Burns's stricter adminis- tration of the Poor Law no better example can be given than the case of Poplar. When Mr. Burns went to the Local Government Board Poplar was enjoying an orgy of sentimental administration. The Poplar Guardians, who were largely under the control of the Socialists, were giving Poor Law relief in the most lavish manner, and there were shrewd suspicions of dishonest administration. A prosecution followed, the administration was tightened up, with the result that Poplar is now spending £61,000 a year less on relief than it was six years ago, and has reduced its paupers from 11,657 to 7,000. All this, of course, is gall and wormwood to the Socialists, who regard lavish expenditure on outdoor relief as one of the most convenient means of transferring property from the " haves " to the "have-riots," and who apparently are intellectually incapable of grasping the fact that if every- body is to receive payment or the equivalent of payment without work there will be soon nothing left with which to pay anybody. In connexion with Poplar, Mr. John Burns threw down a challenge which we sincerely hope that the authorities concerned will promptly take up. Ile declared that the Poplar boys have such splendid facilities for games that they have become excellent cricketers, and are perfectly capable of meeting the second eleven of Eton and beating them. We hope that the Eton boys will rise at once to this suggestion. It would be an excellent pre- cedent for Eton to establish. • Cricket is the common possession of all classes of English boys, and the spectacle of the Poor Law boys from Poplar playing the boys of Eton would be an excellent example to set to the whole country.
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