[To THE EDIT= OF THE " SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—In the article which you devoted on July 20th to old-age pensions attention was drawn to the financial aspect of the question, and some suggestive comparisons were made with the case of New Zealand. May I under this head point out that the case of New Zealand is wholly unlike that of the Mother- country, because New Zealand has no Poor Law system of relief, or, rather, had none until 1898? Her old-age pension system was designed to cure that defect, and is in fact a great scheme of outdoor relief called by a euphemistic name. It is interesting from that point of view to compare the Colonial figures with our own. The population of New Zealand is slightly under 9 hundred thousand souls; that of the United Kingdom a little over 430 hundred thousand. Roughly, therefore, the two communities are proportioned to one another in the ratio of fifty to one; to be more precise, in the proportion of four hundred and thirty to nine. In the year 1906 the Colony paid 2313,000 in pensions and 238,000 in subsidies to charities ; in all, 2350,000 for the relief of its poor. Multiplied by the factor 430/9, that would give sixteen and three-quarter millions as the equivalent outlay in this country. In the year 1905—the latest for which my figures are available; I am quoting from the " Statesman's Year-Book "—our outlay was, in fact, sixteen and a half millions. Between these two figures there may seem to be a very striking agreement until one inquires into their precise significance. Then it will be found that the extent of the relief given is widely different in the two cases. The relief afforded in the United Kingdom is extended to all ages, and the class which comprises paupers of sixty-five years old and upwards numbers only about thirty-six per cent. of the whole. The New Zealand scheme deals with much less than one-half the problem set to our own Poor Law authorities. If the care of the necessitous and the outworn is the real object which the advocates of old-age pensions have in view, then their proposal cannot be too strongly denounced as tending to divert the relief afforded from its real objects by the blind profusion with which it is proposed to scatter it among recipients whose qualifications are imperfectly ascertained. Any person who will pause to ask himself what proportion of his friends who have attained to sixty-five years of age are actually incapacitated will realise that the mere age criterion is no test at all. And statistics bear out one's general impression. In our general population persons of sixty-five years or more count for about six per cent of the whole number of ten years old and upwards. In our com- mercial and industrial population they count for about four per cent. and in the agricultural for about ten per cent. I do not suggest that a pension of 5s. a week would not be a great boon to a hale agricultural labourer or hearty carpenter of sixty-six years old. But I do take leave to say that it is sheer frivolity to propose that, or anything like that, as a remedy for the distress produced by want or as a scheme for the relief of the deserving poor. The poor deserving of public consideration in this sense are not the hale old men who are energetic and self-sufficient at sixty-five and seventy years of age, but the broken men and women of an ages whose specialised faculties or otherwise limited aptitudes are a drug in the market through movements of trade, change of fashion, decay of health, or other casual misfortune. These are the meritorious objects—meritorious in the sense in which misfortune is a merit—of public benevolence, and to those of us whose humanity has not been sapped by rhetoric it is maddening to see their claims post- poned to this demand for old-age sinecures. Do not the Prime Minister and Mr. Asquith—does not Mr. Burns, at least—know well that the pinch of poverty is no respecter of decades ? Do they not know also that, for all its wealth, this teeming land of ours is not rich enough to experiment in extravagance or to divert any considerable part of its public revenue to the creation of privileges and the endowment of even well-deserved repose ? There is a political side to this question which may be—as I think, is—of equal import- voice, but this is already a long letter, and I dare not ask leave to break ground upon that topic.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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