The year that closes to-morrow has a bad record as
regards London pauperism. London, indeed, holds a specially unfavourable position in this respect. It attracts paupers more than other cities, and it has fewer means of providing for them. Whatever be the causes which invest town life with a seemingly irresistible attraction for the inhabitants of our villages, they are more operative in London than anywhere else. London is supposed to furnish more amusements, more hopes of getting regular employment at good wages, more chances of making money in unexpected ways, than any other city. As regards the second of these imaginary recommendations, London really stands at the bottom of the list. It has fewer trades in comparison with the population, and those that it has seem likely more and more to go elsewhere. In London, moreover, we have a special class of paupers which is largely our own creation. We will not attempt to pass judgment on the various methods in which charity comes to the help of poverty ; but undoubtedly these methods are most in evidence in London. The shelters opened by the Salvation Army and the Church Army may have all the merits that their founders claim for them, as may the various associations which give meals to destitute children. But no service that these agencies may render can alter the fact that the publicity without which the funds required for their support could not be raised has one most mischievous result. It draws thousands to London who would not otherwise come there, and who could be far better dealt with in their own neighbourhoods. The wastrels and the professional tramps who form the bulk of our unemployed processions might have done some work if they had stayed at home. In London they speedily lose both the capacity and the wish to do it. Our own good intentions have been largely instrumental in providing the material on which they are exercised. Even farm colonies, the favourite cure for want of employment in London, find no favour with some who ought to be good judges of what the need demands. In the Municipal Journal of yesterday week the new President of the Local Government Board, Mr. John Burns, condemns them in the most unsparing fashion. They are avoided, he says, by unemployed men of character. They break up the continuity of family life. They interrupt the continuity of the work- man's skill and aptitude. They "divert from better agencies what might be more usefully spent on reproductive work for those who have not lost their industrial place and their social pride." In Mr. Burns's eyes, one of the worst faults of the Unemployed Workmen Bill—" than which no more mischievous measure was ever passed "—is that it may be used to set up labour colonies. We are very glad to see Mr. Burns in office, and to discover that the change of position does not seem likely to close his mouth. His speech at Battersea on Wednesday contained a denuncia- tion of "pauperising palliatives" which must be unfamiliar language at the Local Government Board.
Defective administration acts in the same direction. "The examination of what is being done this year," says the Times article, "shows a jumble of relief which is per- fectly appalling." Besides "the relief funds, shelters, free meals, doles of all kinds" which are provided by charity, there is "the outdoor relief of the Guardians, the relief work of borough councils and central committees, not to speak of departures from the recognised principles of the Poor Law sanctioned by the Local Government Board." Here are more reasons why men who dis- like work almost as much as they dislike want should flock to London,—confident, it may be, and justly confident, in their ability to "make up" as men out of work very much more cleverly than the genuine unem- ployed. The worst of these official blunders is the action of the Local Government Board under Mr. Walter Long in regard to outdoor relief. If there is one point that may be taken as established in Poor Law science, it is the costliness of this particular mode of relief. But in certain London Unions the conclusions alike of theory and of experience are deliberately set aside. The most con- spicuous instance of this folly is, of course, the Poplar Union. Nowhere has the spirit of Mr. Long's Order been carried out with such consistent devotion, with the result that "the outdoor paupers maintained by Poplar number 6,997, which is over two-thirds of the total outdoor paupers in the entire district,"—the district, that is, of East London, which contains seven Unions in all. According to the defence usually set up for outdoor relief, this state of things ow,lit to be accompanied by a corresponding decline in the number of indoor paupers. But Poplar shows no such diminution. On the contrary, of every thousand of the population sixty-four are paupers, while in the other six Unions taken together the proportion is only twenty-seven per thousand, and in Whitechapel it falls as low as twenty-four. It is possible that this condition of affairs may in time work :ts own cure. The rates have risen to an amount which is driving industry from the district, and has at last alarmed even a section of the ratepayers,—usually the most mischievously long- suffering class in the world. There may even come a time when what is now a minority may be strong enough to reject representatives who " deliberately exclude the assistance of voluntary charity and prefer to pauperise the community." But ought a great parish like Poplar to be allowed to play ducks and drakes with public money because the ratepayers are too weak or too indolent to check them ? If it were only the ratepayers who suffered, it might be argued with some plausibility that the central authority is not bound to help those who will not help themselves. But the ratepayers are not the only sufferers. The poor themselves have equal reason to curse their mistaken benefactors. In a pauperised community the conditions that minister to honest and regular labour are seldom found, and a comparison with the neighbouring Unions of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green proves this to demonstration. What is the value of a Local Government Board—of a central authority which exists for the express purpose of guiding and keeping in hand local eccentricities—if it leaves a Board of Guardians free to work their wicked will alike upon the ratepayers and the paupers of a Union with a population of close upon one hundred and sixty-nine thousand ? How rapidly a "reform" in the administration of relief may work is shown by the example of St. George's, Hanover Square. Last year this Union was distributing outdoor relief on the Poplar principle, and it had in con- sequence a thousand more paupers than Bethnal Green, with about the same population. In St. George's this • was a specially disastrous fact, because if the Guardians had pursued a more enlightened policy, and had enlisted the co-operation of the many people of means and leisure who live in the district, the poor might have been better helped, and pauperism have almost disappeared. When the case is as clear as this the interests of all concerned ought not to be sacrificed to the fetish of local independence. The simplest way of getting rid of this absurd preference of names to things would be to make the whole of London a single Poor Law Union. The same rate would then be levied over the entire area, and the wealth of London would contribute, as it ought to contribute, to the relief of the poverty of London. The necessary accompaniment of this change would be a single Board of Gimedia.ns for the whole of London. For a body of this importance it would be easier to induce qualified persons to offer themselves for election, while the publicity in which its deliberations would be carried on would go far to substitute sound principles of administration for the kindly, but thought- less, Socialism . which now works so much mischief in some of the outlying parts of London.
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