A History of the English Poor Law

Volume III

Sir George Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138205123
• eBook ISBN: 9781315467719
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1854, this comprehensive work charts over three volumes the history of poor relief in England from the Saxon period through to the establishment of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 and its reception. This edition, updated in 1898, also includes a biography of the author, Sir George Nicholls. Volume III examines poor relief from 1834 to 1898.

This set of books will be of interest to those studying the history of the British welfare state and social policy.

Part the First
From the Passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834, to the Dissolution of The Commission in 1847

Chapter I
The Theory of a Poor Law

Poverty the primitive condition of mankind—Remedy to be found in increase of wealth held in common or on private tenure—A Poor Law not calculated to advance either policy—The Poor Law, if it has staved off revolution, has also retarded civilisation—The Poor Law a medireval development of primitive communism and feudalism—The imprisonment of labour due more to the vague communism of the Poor Law than the Settlement Laws—Fallacy of expecting a strict interpretation by administrators of the 43 Elizabeth, cap. 2—The modern problem stated.

THE primitive condition of mankind is one of poverty, ignorance, and helpless subjection to the forces of nature. The history of civilisation narrates the steps by which man, in part at any rate, has emerged from this original state of disability. Man is not naturally rich, nor wise, nor free. Wealth, knowledge, and liberty are the gifts of civilisation. Personal liberty, the institution of property, the right of exchange, and the enlargement of the intellectual horizon which security creates, are the elements out of which, in the course of history, civilisation has proceeded.

This organisation has, at times, been described as the Natural Organisation of Society, but the terms nature and natural are in truth ambiguous. The Socialism of the Incas of Peru and the political system of Richard Cobden are alike natural. Every form of political action, right or wrong, wise or foolish, is natural. We must refer the preference which we avow for this so-called natural organisation to some more intelligible principle.

In the lower scale of creation the struggle for existence has a grim reality. When we reach the higher scale, and consider the human race and its environment, we observe that, though the struggle for existence is not at an end as against the brute forces of nature, the same principle, the desire of life, the necessity of life, the instinct of self-preservation, which at times prompts destruction, prompts also construction, combination, and the automatic co-operation of mutual exchange. Civilisation, as we understand it, consists in the fact that these promptings which make for destruction are being tamed and eradicated, and that the motives which lead men, in their associated life, to the practice of mutual forbearance instead of war, have become or are becoming the paramount guides of human conduct. Private warfare has given way before the jurisdiction of the law, and this generation is witnessing the beginning of a movement which may one day substitute arbitration for international war.

In the economic experience of many generations of men, exchange of labour and goods, based on an acknowledged right of personal liberty and property, has come to be universally recognised as preferable to the system of slavery and forcible seizure. Both systems are natural, but civilised man is learning that the arts of peace tend more surely to the attainment of his desires, and that, viewed in the light of the great principle of the economy of effort, contract and exchange, and not slavery or promiscuity of possession, offer the true path of progress.¹ Man learns this truth, and his conduct is influenced by it, in precisely the same way as he learns any of the other laws which condition his existence. The acquiescent attitude in regard to this truth, which the civilised world has already taken up, seems, in its main features, to be necessary, inevitable, and irreversible. The communism or socialism involved in the right of seize-who-can has been deliberately rejected by the experience of the ages. Private ownership, and such communism as is rendered practicable by the gradually improving organisation of exchange, have been preferred by the conscience of the civilised world.

The question now agitating the social conscience is—How far is it possible to introduce communism (using the term in the sense of a more equal division of the good things of this world) by means of the principle of legislate-who-can? The controversy which is raised in the endeavour to answer this question is not the subject of this volume, but it is necessary at the very outset to explain the relation of Poor Law theory to this larger discussion.

There are, on the one hand, those who can imagine no better guide than the deliberate experience of mankind and the maxims of social action deduced therefrom. They admit that the natural and deliberately chosen path of progress has not as yet brought to all an equal or satisfactory measure of enjoyment; but any attempt to substitute a distribution of property by legislative enactment, instead of the principle of private ownership and exchange, is in their opinion a retrograde movement, leading society away from that ideal community of enjoyment which, misunderstanding set aside, is the aim and desire of every school of thought.

On the other hand, the Socialist is in favour of introducing some new constructive principle. His imagination conjures up to him, as it does to us all, the outlines of an improved and ideal community. He seeks to drag society to it, by legislative or other form of coercion. He may, in the future, be able to persuade sections of men to attempt some of his experiments. The question remains, Will human experience, which has its own decisive way of chronicling its verdict, be able to give its deliberate approval to these efforts?

Happily, it will be possible to keep the subject of this volume, in large measure, separate and distinct from the larger controversy.

It is admitted on all hands that our present economic system has an almost illimitable power of absorption. It to-day maintains millions of exchangers, where formerly it only maintained thousands. But there is a residuum. Many men, possibly classes of men, remain in a condition of primitive poverty, ignorance, and subjection, all the more aggravated because it can be contrasted with the higher possibilities of the civilised life. For this evil neither the Socialist, nor still less the advocates of personal liberty, imagine that any Poor Law can be a complete remedy. The Socialist is of opinion that the principles which underlie our economic society, as ordinarily understood, have been tried and found wanting, and he has his own plans for their reformation. His opponent, on the other hand, accepts as good much, if not all, that he finds inevitable. The only discipline tolerable to mankind, in his opinion, is the voluntary adjustment of mutual exchange and forbearance. Such satisfaction as exists in the world is due to this principle, and the progress of the world depends on the right conception and right application of it. The power of absorption possessed by existing economic society is far from exhausted, it is practically illimitable. His imagination and experience combined do not suggest any better method of organisation. There are, he admits, in nature and in perverse human ingenuity many obstacles to the complete ascendency of the principle of economic freedom, but our efforts for reform should be devoted to removing or mitigating these causes of obstruction.

The two views here inadequately presented are of course diametrically opposed, but logically their attitude to the Poor Law is the same. Both admit that a maintenance provided by the law for persons in virtue of the fact that their store of property and services is bankrupt, will absorb and aggregate a certain mass of population, just as surely as the so-called system of natural liberty or the millennial Utopia which the Socialist seeks to introduce. The expansion of an uneconomic population maintained by the rates is only limited by the ratepayer's consciousness of the maxim that he may "have exactly as many paupers as he chooses to pay for," and by his occasional efforts to protect himself. Even in the Socialist view, there is no healthy expansion along this line of advance.

No instructed Socialist, so far as we are aware, has ever desired to attain the particular form of legislative communism which he favours, by advancing on it through an expansion of the Poor Law. The Poor Law is, in a sense, a socialistic experiment, but it would be unfair to the theoretic Socialist to hold him or his system responsible for its failure to make pauperism an honourable and happy condition. It may be desirable, as the Socialists maintain, to procure by legislation some measure of "socialisation of property," but it is clearly undesirable to make this experiment by urging men to declare themselves failures, or to enable them to live at the charges of the ever-diminishing number which under such conditions would remain within the circle of economic life, as it at present obtains. Such an experiment would be to court disaster. If the present system of private property and voluntary exchange is to be replaced by Socialism, the new system, if it is to have a chance of success, should not begin by aggregating the population which it hopes to emancipate, on the basis that they are each and all unfortunate and incapable, the deteriorated residuum of the economic system which it seeks to destroy. On the contrary, it must begin with the industries which have been successfully organised, and which already possess a trained and competent industrial population. This view is accepted by the more thoughtful Socialist. He has no desire to apply his formula directly to a pauper population. His hope is that by introducing a new principle into the successful industry of the country, a great addition of absorbent power will be given to it, and that a socialistic organisation of industry will succeed in absorbing pauperism, and in relieving the conscience of civilised society from the pain and scandal of a degraded residuum. The instructed Socialist is well aware that successful constitution-making is not possible when we have to build with pauper material.

On the other hand, those who accept the present constitution of society as representing, fundamentally at all events, the irreversible verdict of the civilised world, believe that the existing industrial economy has an illimitable power of absorption, and that it is highly impolitic to create a rival principle of existence, and to give a too liberal guarantee of maintenance to those whose only success is the acquisition of a character indisputably incompetent.

The issue, therefore, is perfectly clear. The Socialist wishes to reconstruct a society which, by the virtue of some new principle, will absorb pauperism. The advocate of personal liberty and free exchange believes that pauperism can only be absorbed by a wise development of the system on which society is already based. Both parties ought, if they are guided by logic and reason, to be opposed to unnecessary extensions of paupensm.

The provision for pauperism (i.e. for the class which has a difficulty in finding a place for itself in the economic interdependence of modern industry) is a safety-valve where, perhaps, no safety-valve is required. The Socialist demands for his purpose the kindled fire of discontent; it is this alone which will enable him to introduce his system. His opponent also, in so far as his attitude is based on reason, should know that to burst the disabilities of primitive poverty and servitude, a strong motive is necessary. Civilisation is due, in his opinion, to that necessity which is the mother of invention. It is this which has aided the pioneers of progress; it is this which alone can guide to success the laggards who linger among the flesh-pots of pauperism. Both schools of opinion, therefore, should look on any unnecessary extension of a Poor Law as an obstacle to the realisation of their ideals.

Such logical precision is not perhaps to be expected in practical affairs. Those who accept, with all its shortcomings, the existing constitution, are often much enamoured of the use of a safety-valve.¹ The fear of the plain man to face the facts, his belief that pauperism is inevitable, his willingness to discharge his obligation by contemptuous jettisons of ransom, have given rise to a pessimism so disastrous that it has gone far to create the evils before which society stands trembling and irresolute. The Socialist, for his part, is often equally illogical. The visionary temperament, which it is not unfair to impute to a large number of the Socialist party, is more swayed by passion than by reason. A keen sympathy with suffering, and a knowledge that there is no immediate prospect of that revolution which they believe to be its cure, have forced the less logical minds among the party into many extravagant and, even from their own point of view, disastrous relaxations of Poor Law administration. Such persons do not seem to realise that, if they can satisfy their pauper clientèle by opening wide the approaches to a pauper maintenance, they are indefinitely postponing the Socialist millennium.

A French Socialist visiting England has remarked that our English Poor Law system has staved off revolution. There is, however, an alternative view that the institution of a Poor Law has largely retarded the emancipation of the labourer and his acquisition of liberty and property. The misery of the French peasant before 1789 was not caused by the absence of a Poor Law, but by his long retention in a state of feudal servitude. In England feudalism was earlier and more successfully dissolved; the fact that a Poor Law of a larger and more definite shape was super-added on a society successfully emerging from a condition of feudal servitude has probably retarded civilisation quite as much as it has warded off revolution. Indeed, a believer in the high destiny ensured to mankind in the gradual evolution of freedom will be disposed to assert that what it has warded off is not revolution but civilisation.

The prominence lately given to Socialist theory has helped to bring into relief the real issues which underlie the theory of Poor Law administration. Hitherto the matter has been left entirely in the hands of the practical man, and though it is possible to see the working of the principle here suggested throughout the whole range of Poor Law history, the mind of the legislator has only occasionally been influenced by theoretical considerations.

Thus, though legislative theory has never regarded the Poor Law as a constructive force, but only as a palliative, it has not always realised that, whether the law-giver wishes it or not, the provision of a maintenance for that very vague class of persons who are described as destitute is a constructive principle for the absorption and aggregation of population.

The liberal application of the palliative has undoubtedly at different periods of Poor Law history attracted a population which, otherwise, had been absorbed in the economic world of industry. Legislation of a deterrent character has then been directed to mitigate this evil, till, after a period, the evil is forgotten, in dislike of the deterrent measures which have been used to restrain it, and the pendulum of public opinion swings back to the other extreme.

In the history of the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834, we are narrating the course of one of these waves of public sentiment. To understand it, we must study the evils of the old law; the panic of the public before the ruin that threatened; the steps taken by the political leaders of the day to direct the public sentiment to acceptance of the measures which were deemed necessary for its reform; the new constitutional expedient of delegating the legislative authority of Parliament and entrusting the introduction of an unpopular but necessary reform to a non-elective Commission composed of three salaried public servants; their partial success in persuading the democracy to relax its hold on the fatal inheritance of the poor-rate; the ever-recurring tendency of the proletariat, at every industrial crisis, to return again, under the guidance of plausible and reckless politicians, to the stall-fed servitude from which it has been laboriously emancipated.

There probably never was a point of time when it was possible for the legislature to deliberate whether it would have a Poor Law or not. The village community, as Mr. Seebohm has well said, is the shell of serfdom; and serfdom is in itself a system of Poor Law. Feudalism is a later development of this condition of status, and no part of the feudal system is more detailed and precise than the regulations which are laid down for the management of the poor. The Poor Law is not therefore a device invented in the time of Elizabeth to meet a new disease. The very conception of a society based on status involves the existence of a Poor Law far more searching and rigid in its operation than the celebrated 43 Elizabeth, cap. 2. The condition of status was in process of being displaced by the condition of contract before it was possible even to conceive the philanthropic motive which, to some extent, prompted the legislation of the time. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• PART THE FIRST FROM THE PASSING OF THE POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT, 1834, TO DISSOLUTION OF THE COMMISSION IN 1847.
• PART THE SECOND QUESTIONS RESERVED FOR SEPARATE TREATMENT
• PART THE THIRD THE AUTHORITY OF THE CENTRAL BOARD ESTABLISHED, AND THE PRESENT ATTITUDE OF PUBLIC OPINION
• APPENDIX—TABLE OF STATISTICS
• INDEX