The English poor law system, past and present / Trans. by Herbert Preston-Thomas ; with a preface by Henry Sidgwick.

  • Aschrott, P. F. (Paul Felix), 1856-1927.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The English poor law system, past and present / Trans. by Herbert Preston-Thomas ; with a preface by Henry Sidgwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    There is, in the first place, the view held by many thoughtful persons in Germany—a peculiar form of which has been advocated for some years with much zeal and ability by Canon Blackley ^—that the whole method of throwing on the provident the support of the im- provident ” is radically wrong in theory, and mischievous in practice : and that at any rate the normal emergencies of disease (including accident) and old age should be met, in whole or in part, by persuading or compelling the individual to insure himself against them. Other thinkers,^ with an equally keen sense of the dis- advantages of securing to every individual a legal right to be supported by his fellows, advocate imitation of the French system; according to which the State supervises the administration of poor relief, but leaves, in the main, to private benevolence, the provision of the requisite funds. In this way the objection urged by Mill against private charity—that it “ always does too much or too little ” —is as far as possible avoided; while at the same time the im- provident are prevented from claiming sustenance as rightfully due to them from a practically inexhaustible public purse. I conceive, however, that few persons of experience in England would regard it as within the limits of a probable forecast of the future that either self-help, voluntary or compulsory, or private charity, however systematized and supervised, should enable us to dispense with poor relief obtained from taxes. For a long time to come, at any rate, we shall have to work with a combination of all three methods. But it seems by no means unlikely that either or both of the former methods may be considerably extended; and in order to judge of any movement in either direction we require a full and intimate knowledge of the actual working of the poor law, which must necessarily be materially affected by any such movement. But the critics who wish to supersede or diminish public poor relief are not the only assailants of our present system : there are far more dangerous antagonists who aim at making it more copious and indulgent. The old attacks on the Poor Law of 1834, as needlessly harsh and unsympathetic, have never quite died out, and they have received important reinforcement from the spread of socialistic and semi-socialistic opinions in recent years. And there are many signs that the increasing power which the growth of democracy places in ^ In Canon Blackley’s scheme, the fund required to furnish a minimum of Ss. a week in sickness and 4^. a week in old age is to be provided, generally speaking, by compulsory weekly payments for four years from the age of 18 to 21. * See an article by the Rev. W. W. Edwardes on “The Poor in France,” in the Nineteenth Century for February, 1879.