MR BALFOUR ON THE TRAINING OF PAUPER CHILDREN.
ONE of the most useful remarks that Carlyle was never weary of repeating was his comment on the helplessness of human beings in turning to some good account the industry of paupers. Give a man a horse or a dog, he used to say, and he will manage to turn the creature's strength and instinct to some thoroughly useful purpose. But give him that infinitely more wonderful thing, a hungry and unemployed man, and he will find him a sheer expense and difficulty, and it is ten to one that he will never make any effective use of him at all. That is perfectly true, and it is not perhaps quite so inex- plicable as Carlyle thought. The more elaborate the instrument, the more difficult it is to use it rightly. If you had an organ even in good tune, it would take you a long time to find any one who could use it to much purpose. And if you had an organ out of tune, it would be still harder to find any one who could first order anew the jangled notes, and then play it so as to delight and refresh the heart of man. Now, hungry and destitute men, and still more, in some sense, hungry and destitute children, are much more delicate and elaborate instruments than any organ, even an organ out of tune. The latter have in them not only a great variety of capacities for ordered and disordered sounds, but a multitude of potential ingenuities and affections inclosed in their elaborate little bodies and brains to which it is by no means easy to find the key. The true key, a home with parents fully prepared by nature to elicit and direct their immature wants and activities, has been lost, and nothing is more difficult than to find any respectable equivalent for the lost key. Yet this is the very difficult and complex problem with which the civilisation of the West has been grappling so long with so little success. It is compara- tively easy to find some equivalent for the instincts of the mother in the case of a horse or dog, and even to improve on those instincts when once the proper way to find and administer the right food has been discovered. But in the case of our pauper children it is far from easy, and we have hitherto succeeded very ill in finding the proper sub- stitute for parental care,—namely, persons sufficiently kind and thoughtful to provide, and yet sufficiently plain and sensible not to overdo, the care which a good-hearted parent with his own livelihood to get, and his natural desire to make his children in their turn self-supporting, would have supplied. We have tried, as Mr. Balfour told us in his speech at Wilmslow on Monday, the plan of educating pauper children in great barracks, with all the school machinery in good working order to prune and train their faculties for use, and we have found it a very bad plan. In such barracks there is no really human training of their affections; and without that the child grows up either a machine without an intelli- gence to work it, which is bad, or a child with a soured heart., and a greedy appetite for its own selfish pleasures, which is worse. What is called the lodging-house system, which supplies the children,—rather at haphazard,—with foster-parents of their own, has been a vast improve- ment on it. But that, as Mr. Balfour says, has difficulties of its own, for it involves the necessity of spreading the children far and wide in the houses of the poor, without any efficient supervision by those who are really respon- sible for their education ; in short, it involves casting them on the world and taking the chance of their falling on their feet. And though most of them do fall on their feet, it is not easy to ignore the responsibility for those who do not, of whom there will always be a certain percentage.
The scheme which the Chorlton Guardians are therefore determined to try is one which will attempt to combine the full responsibility of the Guardians for the children of their workhouses, with the foster-parent system, which has been found on the whole so much more effective than the barrack-schools. They are building a model village on fifty acres of land, and investing a large sum, £50,000, in the experiment. They are going in the first instance to build twelve large cottage-homes with twenty beds in each, and four smaller cottage-homes with ten beds each. For each of these cottages, as we understand, trustworthy foster-parents will be chosen, and all of them of course will be under the immediate eye and inspection of the Guardians themselves. We should have thought the cottages with twenty children in each would be too large, that it would be found impossible to provide anything at all like a domestic system for twenty children under one roof. But if it should prove so, no doubt they can easily be subdivided, and the households contracted. It may be that there are some children who will get on better in something like a small boarding-school, with a considerable variety of school companions, than they would in a smaller home; while others will prosper better with more individual attention. The whole problem is one requiring steady and carefully tentative experiment, and the Guardians are right in feeling their way, though we should have thought that the smaller houses would have been more likely to succeed than the larger. At the same time, as the real difficulty will be to pick out efficient foster-parents, it may very well be that the Guardians would rather have to find sixteen such pairs of foster- parents than twenty-eight, and that they are rather looking to the limited number of foster-parents equal to their task, than to the ideal number whom they would find if they were there to be found. It is one thing to be reasonably good parents to your own children, and quite another to be able to take up semi-parental relations to children of whom you know nothing but their needs. And as everything depends on these foster-parents, it may be very wise not to assume, what can hardly be true, that they are as plenty as blackberries.
Of course it will be objected to all this elaborate provision for the children of pauper parents, that the effect of it will be to make the poor indifferent whether they can provide for their families or not, since if they cannot do so the State will take them over and probably provide them with a better education, and possibly a happier infancy, than they would have got in their own homes. And so far as it goes this objection is a sound objection ; but we do not think that it goes very far. How many of the poor would be deterred from an early marriage by the consideration that if they could not bring up their own children decently, those children would probably be wretched and neglected ? We fear very few, if any. And even if there were a few likely to be deterred from an early marriage by such a consideration, we do not think that it would be justifiable deliberately to ruin children's lives who are not responsible for their parents' thriftlessness, in order that the few who would be deterred from early marriages by the prospect of such misery for their children, might be so deterred. Nobody can show that we are justified in wrecking lives already in being, simply that thriftless men and women may be frightened from rashly entering on domestic life by the fear of such a wreckage for their children's lives. Besides, as we have already said, we doubt whether a single couple were ever held back from an imprudent marriage by such considerations. There is a happy - go - lucky habit of thought among the poor which shuts out such anxious forecasts as these. And even if it were otherwise, we are sure that it is not right to let children who are perfectly irresponsible for their parents' thought- lessness suffer for that thoughtlessness in ruined and miserable lives. Let us be as severe as we may in bring- ing home the responsibility of the thriftless for their own misdeeds, but it cannot be anything but wrong to punish them, through their innocent children, for their want of thrift and forethought.
Mr. Balfour showed by his speeches at Wilmslow that he is deeply interested in the great problem how to deal with the children of paupers so as to turn them into efficient citizens who will promote both the wealth and the stability of the State. We wish he would consider the desirability of establishing under the Local Government Board a special department charged with the care of workhouse children. Both as regards the principles and the administrative machinery, that would be entirely distinct from any department charged with the care of adult paupers. It is not desirable to make the children suffer for the sins of their parents, but it is desirable that pauper adults should suffer for their own thriftlessness and indolence. And, again, the arrange- ments for dealing with the children of paupers are neces- sarily quite distinct from the arrangements for dealing with destitute men and women. We believe that the construction of a separate department for the treatment of pauper children, would cause a vast improvement in the administrative organisation, and would enable the State to select a much more competent body of official experts for the care of the children of the State.
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