LONDON AND ITS GUARDIANS.
TIRE indifference which the London ratepayer has 1 shown in the election of the Poor Law Guardians does little credit to his common-sense. No one on Monday would have supposed that a contest equal in importance to those for the Borough Councils and for the Loudon County Council was in progress. No one on Tuesday would have supposed that the news which way the elections had gone might appear at any moment. The placards of the evening papers were guiltless of any refer- ence to the previdus day's voting. The officials concerned with the counting of votes threw themselves heartily ihto the spirit which had marked the contest throughout. Even on Wednesday the complete results were not published, though so far as they had come to band they seemed to place the Municipal ,Reformers in a majority. The explanation of this absence of interest is, in part, that the election came close upon the heels of the County Council election. To have to go to the poll on two days in the same month is a burden which ratepayers only recently awakened to a sense of their municipal duties could hardly be expected to take up. A second reason niay be found in the absence of political associations. The Borough Councils elections and the County Council election seemed in some Measure to restore London to the Conservative cause. People did not vote merely as. rate- payers. They felt that they were helping to• Undo the work 'of January, 1906. In Monday's contest there was little or nothing of this exhilaratinimotive. The prospects of the Government are little affected by the preference shown to this or that Guardian of the Poor. The policy which governs our administration of poor relief is not determined by party considerations. The most mitschieyons administrative act since 1834—the relaxation of ' the restrictions on outdoor relief—was the work of a Con-
servative Minister. - ;
Yet the care of the poor constitutes one of the chief financial burdens which Londoners have to bear. Nothing would do more to make the visits of the rate-collector less formidable than a sensible reduction of the Poor, rate. From this point of view, the . Guardians are a most important factor in local .finance. Municipal Re- formers may check extravagance in other departments of local administration. They may. keep municipal trading within bounds, and discourage experiments in the direction of Socialism. But so long as poor relief is organised on extravagant lines their efforts will bear little visible fruit. He who preaches economy in this department of public expenditure has to struggle, however, against the natural indisposition to make the lot of the poor any harder than at the best of times it is. To reason in this way is to forget that the poor include many more than those in aatual receipt of relief. The advocates of a liberal administration of the Poor Law seem to divide society into two classes: the poor, who are living in workhouses or receiving a weekly dole outside ; and the rich, who.are constantly trying to shake off their obligations towards those beneath them. They forget that those on whom the support of the inmates of workhouses and the recipients of outdoor relief legally falls are in many cases them- selves poor,--poor not in any merely conventional sense, but in the sense of finding it a daily struggle to earn a living. In one form or another every poor. man who, is not in receipt of relief himself is contributing' to the relief of others. Such men are wonderfully long-suffering. They see palaces building for what we agree to call their less fortunate neighbburs, they know that each ? additional pound spent in this way means the exacting of some infinitesimal fraction of a pound from themselies, and they are silent. But it is time that the oomplaint which they do not make for themselves should be made fur them. If the standard of living inside the work- house is to go on rising, while the standard of living out side the workhouse remains unchanged, the result inust be that the inducement to keep out of the workhouse will perpetually grow weaker. Mr. Crooks, to whom we are indebted for so many candid and enlightening statements, has told us that his idea of the proper treatment of a pauper is that he should be made as comfortable as, a labourer with a wage of 30s. a, week. Now a great many labourers manage to live, and live decently, on a good deal less than 30s. a week, and we fail to see what inducement Mr. Crooks's plan leaves' them for supporting themselves, instead of being supported by their neighbours. To a man making 24s. a week by his own labour migration to the workhouse will mean a rise of 6s. a week in wages. That is a very substantial inducement, and even this does not constitute the whole gain. Not only will he get more, but he will.be relieved from the burden of having to help in finding 30s. a week for others who are already paupers. For a time, no doubt, he may resist the temptation. The dislike to being supported by the community has not quite died out, and pauperism is still accounted inferior to independence. But how long is this unreal distinction. likely to be maintained ? If the comfort of the inmates of a workhouse is to take precedence of all other considers.- tions, it is not only their dietary that will be improved. Man does not live by bread alone, and a pauper s self- respect will be outraged by useless restrictions on his liberty of movement. At this moment, no doulat, the man in'a workhouse is in various ways less free than the man outside. But when all other distinctions have vanished, there can be no reason for keeping alive this solitary remnant of an extinct order of things. By that time, of course, the word "pauper" will have disappeared from the language; to be replaced possibly by "resident pensioner." This is the condition of thiags-on whiCh the ratepayers of London had to pass judgment on Monday.
The special difficulties of the, London Poor Law system arise from the way in which the burden of poor relief is distributed. It falls most heavily on those Who are least able to bear it. London is more and more becoming two citie,s,—a city of the poor, and a city of the well-toklo. In one of these is collected the industry and the hands, in the other the wealth and the brains. Yet the two are dependent on one another. The capitalist needs the work- man, the workman needs the capitalist. The poor city exists for the use and benefit of the rich city, and it is only just that the burden of maintaining those in the poor city who cannot maintain themselves should be shared by the dwellers in the rich city. To some extent this is already the case. Specific charges have been thrown upon the common fund, instead of being borne exclusively by the local fund. But this partial relief should be made general. London for Poor Law purposes should be treated as a single Union. If this reform applied only to the levying of rates, there would be little difficulty in carrying it out.. The justice of the proposal to make all Londoners bear their share of the common burden is so obvious that it could hardly be seriously resisted. But this change, standing by itself, would remove the one check to which local extravagance is at present subject. If Poplar spends money without thought when a large part of what it spends has to be raised in Poplar, what limit would there be to its outlay if the whole sum were thrown upon the common fund ? Equalisation of rates must be accom- panied by centralisation of control. When Poplar—we cite this one instance merely because recent incidents have made thedistrict familiar to everybody—no longer main- tains its own paupers she must no longer determine the standard on -which they are to be maintained. That this conclusion will be disputed we do not expect. The relation between paying the piper and calling the tune is too well established to make any opposition in principle at all probable. But where questions of local self-government are involved other considerations than those of mere principle come into play. Nothing is more difficult than to induce those who are charged with the spending of money to hand over the duty to others. The local authorities all over London would probably be hostile to the Bill. The Guardians of the well-managed Unions would be loth to make over their work to hands which might prove less competent. The Guardians of the extravagant Unions would have a reasonable fear that their expenditure would have no parallel in that of the Central Board. And everywhere these objections would be reinforced by the irritation which men naturally feel when they are told that their unpaid services are no longer required. Yet if poor relief in London is to be placed on a satisfactory footing, the change in question is indis- pensable. The contribution must be common, and the distribution must be entrusted to' a common authority. That. the Government will add to their already over- crowded list of measures is hardly to be expected, but at least we may hope that this necessary reform will be included in the recommendations of the Poor Law Commission.
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