The Scottish Poor Law : examined in its principles and tried by its results : with suggestion of remedies / by Alexander Wood.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Scottish Poor Law : examined in its principles and tried by its results : with suggestion of remedies / by Alexander Wood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    PART I. EXAMINATION OF THE PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE POOR LAW IS FOUNDED. The establishment of a Poor Law on logical principles de- mands as a postulate the truth of the following proposition : •* That the State is bound to maintain in bare subsistence every one who has been born within its limits, and who, no matter from what cause, has failed to be able to earn a maintenance for himself. Let us examine the truth of this postulate. The State may be, as Bentham contends, a mere voluntary association of certain persons who, for the sake of their mutual protection, agree to frame a certain government, and to enforce certain laws. Or it may be, as others regard it, a paternal government, the upward extension of the family, charging itself with the care of all its members, just as the father is charged with that of all his household. We know of no theory of government which may not be referred to one or other of these classes, and, as far as I can see, under neither of them can Poor Laws be justly maintained. The first theory holds that the object of the State is to pro- vide the greatest happiness for the greatest number; the other, that its object should be to enforce those natural rights which every man possesses, and which it is the duty of the State as a paternal government to maintain. I ask this question: Is it consistent with the duty of a Government which should provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number, to maintain, slightly above the point of starvation, a multitude who are con- tinually propagating their kind with unusual fecundity, and who are perpetually dragging down into their vortex the class immediately above them, and who are the prolific source whence the ranks of the dangerous classes are chiefly recruited, whose existence necessitates not only poor laws and workhouses, but polipe ofnces, jails, hospitals, houses of refuge, Magdalen asy-