THE MANUFACTURE OF PAUPERS.
L'ro THE EDITOR Or TILE SPECTATOR:1 SIR,—A series of articles has appeared in your journal designed to show that some of our present methods of dealing with poverty result in the manufacture of pauperism. On this your correspondent of the 4th inst., Mr. A. Herbert Gray, accepting apparently the force of the argument, demands, on behalf of the "ordinary reader," some exposition of a con- structive policy, and jumps to the large and, as it seems to me, irrelevant conclusion that it is "time we admitted that the competitive system has been a failure." There is surely something strange in the contention that, because a weekly journal has argued that our Poor Law needs reform, it is under an obligation to frame an apologia for the economic order under which inevitably our lot is cast, and to set out the various constructive forces which hold civilisation together, and on which, if precedent in such matters is of any value, we have to rely for further progress. The fact that such a demand is made by a thoughtful and reasonable writer suggests to me that there is a gap in our economic literature which may be recommended to the consideration of our teachers of political economy. I cannot (and I am a fairly diligent amateur in such matters), and I shall be surprised if any of your better instructed readers can, refer Mr. Gray to any work of apologetics for our competitive, or, as I should prefer to call it, our automatically co-operative, system. Mr. Gray seeks to throw upon you the large responsibility of compiling one, and lightly suggests that, somehow or other, we are to contract ourselves out of a system which is the slow growth of thousands of years, merely because some one in your columns has shown that our local administration of the Poor Law is faulty. The editorial comment on Mr. Gray's demand is somewhat cryptic, but it is obvious to one, at least, of your ordinary readers that this demand for an exposition of social theory ab ovo is not quite reasonable. We hardly need a series of articles from you—though, in view of the laches of the professed economists, such a series would be welcome—to make us aware that, after all, the system is inevitable, has conferred ,many benefits on mankind, and is tolerable ; further, that there are construc- tive influences at work which have caused improvement in the past, and will continue to cause it in the future. Any one who has a turn for philanthropy can endeavour to draw attention to these and to quicken their action, and, in
order to clear the way for their advance, he will seek to mitigate the ravages of drink, gambling, and the Poor Law as at present administered. These things are hostile to the natural constructive forces of a free society.
The arts of thriving are, of course, difficult, but not impossible to practise. If there is any trust to be placed in the unanimous verdict of statisticians, the financial position of the working class, in spite of Mr. Gray's pessimism, is stronger than it has ever been. Ownership of a modicum of property is not an unattain- able ideal. The acquisition, through the Co-operative 1114)V011100t, of a share in the industrial capital of the country, policies of insurance which enable a wage-earner to accumulate a capital for future emergency, and many other expedients enable the poor man to contract himself out of the primitive proletariat poverty in which he has been too long content to linger. As to the difficult question of unemployment, there is no limit in any rationally conceived system of free enterprise to the infinite extension of the exchange of services ; but organisation is defective at many points. There is no proper direction of the labour of the .young into the best channels. There are unreasonable pretensions on the part of the employer and the employed. There has been in the past much immobility imposed on the labouring class by an ill-administered Poor Law. A monopoly claimed in one place by a Trade-Union exalts one section, but elsewhere the same policy results in an exclusion which has hindered the advance of many. In the discussion and elucidation of this friction there is room for the good offices of the intelligent philanthropist. We have all much to learn on the subject, and the resources of civilisation are not exhausted.
My object, however, was not to attempt to formulate the con- structive policy demanded by Mr. Gray, but to protest against the assumption that because a man objects to certain methods of Poor Law administration, he is called on to produce on a half- sheet of paper an apology for the inevitable economy under which we live. That such an apology could be framed I believe, and tha$ it might be worth doing the letter of your correspondent and the difficulty of referring him to a satisfactory text-book are perhaps a proof.
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