The break-up of the poor law : being part one of the minority report of the Poor Law Commission / edited, with Introduction, by Sidney & Beatrice Webb.

  • Great Britain. Poor Law Commission.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The break-up of the poor law : being part one of the minority report of the Poor Law Commission / edited, with Introduction, by Sidney & Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    wife) for tlie task. And the very mixture of functions— the impossibility of attaining technical excellence or, indeed, achieving any recognisable success, in any one of them— has, we have repeatedly noticed, a subtle deteriorating effect on the persons appointed. This is hard on the large class of excellent men and women, for the most part quite poorly remunerated, whom the General Mixed Workhouse has enlisted in its service. Here and there we meet exceptionally gifted natures, whose faith and love and moral refinement enable them, to some extent, to with- stand the deadening influence of the non-specialised insti- tution, and to persist in regarding each inmate as an individual soul. But to the common run of men and women who gain appointments as Master and Matron, there comes to be, amid all the differences of sex or age or character, or health, or strength, or defectiveness, but one category of inmate—the pauper; the person who ought not to be there; the semi-delinquent who ought to be grateful for being, at the public expense, just kept alive; whose condition, far from being improved, is sup- posed always to be kept less eligible than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer. The effect of having always to superintend and organise, not a hospital or a school, a lunatic asylum, or even a reformatory, in which there is some recognisable standard of technical success, but a hopeless mass of undifferentiated pauperism, with which there is nothing to be done, necessarily develops in the ordinary man or woman, during the years of fruit- less service, a particular type of character, manifesting itself in a certain trick of bearing, even a peculiar facial expression quickly recognisable by the experienced visitor. **We all know, remarks a professional journal, *'the common uneducated type of man to be found in this office in so many places; his mind stored, for the confounding of newly-elected Guardians, with rules, bylaws and regulations, his heart hardened by long contact with a system under which deceit is the only means by which relaxation of rules can be obtained. As some of the best among these Workhouse Officers pathetically complained to us, the men and women whom we harness to the service