THE DISTRESS IN SOUTH WALES. T HE experience through which South
Wales is now passing may well teach Englishmen a little modesty. They are accustomed to look at the Poor-law with a curious mix- ture of shame and pride. They are often willing to abuse it, and to lay at its door the blame of the thriftlessness and extravagance which characterise the working-class, but they commonly end by saying that it is a great thing to have a law which makes starvation impossible except by the obstinacy of the sufferer. It certainly seems that this excellent arrange- ment has somehow got out of gear in South Wales. The correspondence of the daily newspapers is full of accounts of the condition of the district, from which it appears that de- stitution is almost universal, and that the standard of living has fallen so low that destitution may at any moment, and in almost any conceivable per-centage of cases, pass into starvation. The great industry of the district has broken down. There is no more iron wanted, or if it is wanted, it is got elsewhere. The whole population depended on iron, directly or indirectly, and the close of the Works has been to South Wales all that the Cotton Famine was to Lancashire. There is no iron to be made, no coal to be dug to make it, no wages to be paid for work, and consequently no money to be spent in the shops. The masters cannot go on working at a profit, but then, in their case, there are realised profits ; and annoying as it may be to see all the money you have invested in machinery going to waste, there is solid comfort in the re- flection that past success has made any pinching economies superfluous. The workmen are equally spared the necessity of considering where they must save, because all the means of saving have been withdrawn from them. There is no more money coming in weekly, and what they have been able to raise by the sale of their furniture and clothes is already ex- hausted. They are one and all in the condition which the Poor-law is expressly designed to meet, the condition, that is, of men for whom there is no work, however willing they are to do it. But the Poor-law is paralysed in presence of the fact that the classes by whom the Poor-rate is mainly contributed are themselves in a condition which, if the demand were made equal to the need, would, as regards many of them, be scarcely distinguishable from that of the workmen. How does the small shopkeeper, or even the humble professional man, ordinarily contrive to live ? By supplying the wants of the population round him. But he who supplies the wants of the population round him at this juncture must be content to do so without fee or reward. The problem how to live on nothing a day must be coming almost as near home to many of the rate-paying class in South Wales as it has already come to the rate-supported class. When the burden is so heavy as this, it does not take much of an addition to break the back, and the mere necessity of paying an enormous poor-rate might serve as the last straw. This will always be a difficulty in districts where the ratepayers mainly belong to the middle-class, and derive their income from feeding, or clothing, or curing the workmen around them. The Poor-law is an excellent instrument for dealing with accidental cases of destitution, or for constant or recurrent destitution when it affects only a small class, such as sick people or old people. But it never can stand alone in presence of so vast a calamity as that under which South Wales is now suffering, for the simple reason that the principle of a poor-law implies the relief of local distress out of local funds, and in cases like this the local distress eats up the local funds. We are not going to maintain that no part of this terrible distress is due to the sufferers' own fault. On the contrary, there are two errors that stand prominently out as largely contributing to it,—extravagance when times were good, and imprudent strikes when times were bad. The first of these errors is unfortunately common to a large proportion of the working-class in this country. They save for some special purposes—for sickness, for burial, for support while they are out of work—of their own choice. But they do not save for bad times generally, for times such as the present, when work is not to be had, however willing they may be to take it on any terms. Supposing that for the two years preceding the break-down of the iron trade every man making 25s. a week had put by 5s. of it, he might have lived on his savings for half a year of absolute idleness ; or better still, because there seems no prospect of the iron industry in South Wales reviving, he would have had money enough to move his family as well as himself to a district in which work is still to be had. But though the advantages of thrift are undeniable, the obstacles to its practice are often overlooked. After all, 25s. is not a large sum for a man and his wife and children to spend be- tween them in a week. The results of not putting by any part of it are terrible, when we see them pushed to an ex- treme, as they are now in South Wales • but when it comes to casting the first stone at the spendthrift, many of us will be inclined to slink away. Indeed, we are by no means sure that the philosophy of thrift has yet been satisfactorily worked out, or that its practice is generally compatible with the physical energy demanded by employments like mining or with the conditions of city life. Certainly it has been found that in France, the typical land of thrift, the virtue which is so paramount in the peasant and bourgeois classes disappears, when thepasants leave the country and set up as artisans in the towns.
ThatStrikes have played their part in bringing South Wales to its present plight is not much to the purpose. The men have been exceedingly unwise in striking so often against a reduction of. wages, because a strike is rarely justified by its results, ex- cept when it is made to obtain a rise of wages. But they are not now on strike, or refusing to work in obedience to the dic- tates of a Union. There is no work for them to do, and though their own mistakes may have largely contributed to this state of things, yet these mistakes can scarcely be thought worthy of capital punishment, especially as they are not now being persisted in. For to withhold relief now would be to inflict nothing short of capital punishment, since without it a great part of the population must die.
It does not appear that the public generally have yet taken in the real extent of the calamity. It is quite natural that they should not do so, because they instinctively suppose that the Poor-law is an infallible security against starvation. They are not accustomed to the notion of a degree of distress with which the Poor-law is incompetent to deal. Yet the accounts given in the Standard and the Daily News entirely bear out the theoretical doubt as to the possibility of raising sufficient funds in the district to meet the need, even to the extent of merely keeping the people alive. At all events, if there is any doubt upon this head, itcan easily be laid to rest. Parliament is sitting, and a question addressed to Mr. Sclater-Booth will at least draw from him a statement that the Poor-law is or is not able to bear the strain which is now being put on it. If Mr. Sclater-Booth is confident that his Department can do all that is wanted, by all means let the work be left to him and his subordinates.
In an exceptional disaster such as this, there is not much fear of people coming on the rates without just cause, or being pauperised by the mere fact that they have come on them. But if the Poor-law authorities are not strong enough for the work, no scruples about being over-impor- tunate for charitable works ought to be suffered to stand in the way. We care little whether the subscriptions are collected through a Mansion-House Committee, or through some less dignified, but perhaps less costly agency. But the Lord Mayor has become so completely the recognised fugleman of the English public in matters of charity, that it seems natural to look to him for the organisa- tion of this, as of so many other subscriptions. The Lord Mayor is not in the position of the incumbent of a proprietary chapel who fears that if he gets too much money out of his pew-holders for distant objects, the collections for church expenses or the Easter offerings may fall short. The measure of the Lord Mayor's intervention should be, not the frequency of the occasions, but the dimensions of the need ; and judged by this standard, there can be no question as to the fitness of the distress in South Wales to be made the text of a Mansion-House exhortation to liberality. But whether through this channel, or through any other that may be substituted for it, money ought to be given freely. It is important, moreover, that there should be as the Bishop of Manchester has suggested, a Central Relief Committee, armed with full power to apportion the bounty of the public equitably among the several claimants. District Committees naturally represent, for the most part, and consequently think most of, the wants of the populous centres. There are many mountain villages wholly dependent, on the extinct industry in which the distress is as great am in the better-known towns, and the means of relieving it are necessarily smaller, even if they are not altogether wanting. A, Central Committee can distribute the funds among the several districts with more assured impartiality than even the beat local Committee, because what is wanting in local knowledge- is more than made up by the superiority to even a suspicion of local partisanship.
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