GROUP 11—SOCIETY
ward off the effects of poverty. The means for the relief of hunger are close at hand; and the impulse to give in kind is so elemental that it persists long under quite different social conditions. . Even the most stingy people who would not give money of the smallest value to the beggar will give bread. There is a deep-seated belief in the hearts of all that no one can be doing wrong in giving food for instant wants. While the organisation of Society remained simple, this feeling sufficed for the allaying of such poverty as prevailed, where the very poor were few and the very rich almost nonexistent. It suffices still in the rural parts of some lands. In mediaeval days it found a sort of organised expression through the monasteries, which dispensed hospitality without attaching to it an undignified personal obligation. Even yet people feel they can take from a monastery without being shamed, though they are better able to assist the hospice than it is to assist them. The vague and beautiful relations of courtesy, hospitality, and charity, before the days when
The giver may not give, lest any blame him,
And the taker may not take, lest taking shame him,
were well enough in the childhood of the world, while human intercourse was personal throughout all society, and mutual and cordial understandings pervaded a whole country-side at once.
The Failure of Charity in Keeping Pace with Civilisation
But that idyllic state became broken up in our own country by war, by pestilence, by new economic combinations, such as the grouping of men in masses for manufacturing purposes, and by the extraordinary subdivisions of labour which have followed the use of machinery, and have made men skilled in small sections of work, and unskilled in all else. The personal relationships have failed with the growing complexity of life, and they must be replaced by a new, collective, wisely-generalled humanity, if the poor are not to suffer, and perhaps increase. The passage from the old to the new during the last three hundred years has been marked by grievous strife, experimenting, and mistakes, which we may follow with painful advantage if it helps us to clear the future from the proved impediments of the past.
The relation between the State and the English poor, as set forth in our laws, has undergone four great changes since history had a full record, and it is on the eve of a 3766 fifth. There was the period before Queen Elizabeth, when repressive measures were tried, and, failing, gradually became merged into voluntary relief. Then there was a compulsory system of relief, organised locally, and lasting for more than a hundred and fifty years. But this plan could not accommodate itself to the vast economic changes which came with mechanical invention and the use of steam. Indeed, it proved a source of demoralisation to the point of national danger before it was superseded by the modern Poor Law system—a great advance, but lapsing into admitted inadequacy after nearly eighty years of use. The fifth period asks insistently to be begun, without at present eliciting any response from too busy Governments. We wish to look at these successive stages of experiment in more detail.
The Attempt to Suppress the Signs of Poverty by Force
The most ancient laws for dealing with the poor are predominantly, if not entirely, repressive. Where poverty reached a stage that called for public notice, it was regarded as bordering on the criminal, and was confounded with begging and vagrancy. The giving of indiscriminate alms was forbidden, and anyone found offending could be fined ten times the amount he had given ; but by the reign of Henry VIII. it had become necessary to define the “ poor creatures ” wdio could properly be “ holpen,” and those who might live by charity were registered and licensed within certain limits, while “ valiant beggars ” able to work were subjected to additionally stringent penalties. The law sought to punish those who did not work, and to make them work, be they young or old.
Drastic Laws that Failed in the Repression of Vagrancy
Thus a statute of Henry VIII. (22 cap. 12), which remained in force for sixty years afterwards, ran that any person, “ being whole and mighty in body, and able to labour, having no land master, nor any useful merchandise, craft, or mystery, and who can give no reckoning how he doth get his living,” shall be brought before the Justices of the- Peace, who, “ at their discretion, shall cause every such idle person to be had to the next market town, or other place most convenient, and there be tied to the end of a cart, naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the same town, or other place, till hi% body be bloody by reason of such whipping; and after such punishment he shall be enjoined, upon his oath, to return, forthwith, the next straight way, to – the place where he was born, or where he last dwelt the space of three years, and there put himself to labour, like as a true man oughteth to do.”
The giver may not give, lest any blame him,
And the taker may not take, lest taking shame him,
were well enough in the childhood of the world, while human intercourse was personal throughout all society, and mutual and cordial understandings pervaded a whole country-side at once.
The Failure of Charity in Keeping Pace with Civilisation
But that idyllic state became broken up in our own country by war, by pestilence, by new economic combinations, such as the grouping of men in masses for manufacturing purposes, and by the extraordinary subdivisions of labour which have followed the use of machinery, and have made men skilled in small sections of work, and unskilled in all else. The personal relationships have failed with the growing complexity of life, and they must be replaced by a new, collective, wisely-generalled humanity, if the poor are not to suffer, and perhaps increase. The passage from the old to the new during the last three hundred years has been marked by grievous strife, experimenting, and mistakes, which we may follow with painful advantage if it helps us to clear the future from the proved impediments of the past.
The relation between the State and the English poor, as set forth in our laws, has undergone four great changes since history had a full record, and it is on the eve of a 3766 fifth. There was the period before Queen Elizabeth, when repressive measures were tried, and, failing, gradually became merged into voluntary relief. Then there was a compulsory system of relief, organised locally, and lasting for more than a hundred and fifty years. But this plan could not accommodate itself to the vast economic changes which came with mechanical invention and the use of steam. Indeed, it proved a source of demoralisation to the point of national danger before it was superseded by the modern Poor Law system—a great advance, but lapsing into admitted inadequacy after nearly eighty years of use. The fifth period asks insistently to be begun, without at present eliciting any response from too busy Governments. We wish to look at these successive stages of experiment in more detail.
The Attempt to Suppress the Signs of Poverty by Force
The most ancient laws for dealing with the poor are predominantly, if not entirely, repressive. Where poverty reached a stage that called for public notice, it was regarded as bordering on the criminal, and was confounded with begging and vagrancy. The giving of indiscriminate alms was forbidden, and anyone found offending could be fined ten times the amount he had given ; but by the reign of Henry VIII. it had become necessary to define the “ poor creatures ” wdio could properly be “ holpen,” and those who might live by charity were registered and licensed within certain limits, while “ valiant beggars ” able to work were subjected to additionally stringent penalties. The law sought to punish those who did not work, and to make them work, be they young or old.
Drastic Laws that Failed in the Repression of Vagrancy
Thus a statute of Henry VIII. (22 cap. 12), which remained in force for sixty years afterwards, ran that any person, “ being whole and mighty in body, and able to labour, having no land master, nor any useful merchandise, craft, or mystery, and who can give no reckoning how he doth get his living,” shall be brought before the Justices of the- Peace, who, “ at their discretion, shall cause every such idle person to be had to the next market town, or other place most convenient, and there be tied to the end of a cart, naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the same town, or other place, till hi% body be bloody by reason of such whipping; and after such punishment he shall be enjoined, upon his oath, to return, forthwith, the next straight way, to – the place where he was born, or where he last dwelt the space of three years, and there put himself to labour, like as a true man oughteth to do.”
If he was caught a second time begging while able to work, he must have a hole bored through the gristle of his right ear— the instruction in a later renewal of the statute being that the instrument must be a hot iron, and the size of the mutilation “ the compass of an inch about.” For a third defence he could be put to death, “ as a felon and enemy of the commonwealth.” Under the same statute “ all idle children ” over five years of age could be “ appointed to masters of industry, or other craft or labour, to be taught.”
When Slavery was a Punishment for the Saucy Child
These laws were made more stringent in the reign of Edward VI., the vagrant, for a first offence, being branded with the letter V ; for the second offence with the letter S (slave) ; and the third penalty was death. Anyone could take away the child of a “ loiterer and idle wanderer,” and bring it up till twenty, if a female child, and till twenty-four if a male, and appropriate the produce of its labours ; and if it should at any time resent chastisement by its master, the penalty was that it should remain a slave for life.
This statute, be it said, for the relief of that age from some measure of odium, only remained in force two years, but it shows the governing spirit of the period.
The punitive laws, with forced apprenticeship, and fixed wages for which every man must work when work was demanded of him, of course, proved ineffective, and presently—in the reign of Henry VIII.— arrangements were made for voluntary alms to be contributed for relief of the poor, after persuasion, on Sundays and holidays ; but, this being a failure, collections for “ the poor in very deed ” were made compulsory in the reign of Elizabeth, with possible imprisonment for non-compliance.
A Poor Law that Remained in Force fos;
Twenty-Three Decades
Later, shortly before the death of the great queen, the Poor Law, as it has been known ever since, was in essence established —that is to say, in each parish all the inhabitants were taxed compulsorily, overseers of the poor were appointed,. and arrangements for collecting and distributing the funds were made. Work was to be provided for those who could work, and relief was to be given to those who could not work. Poor children were to be trained to some handicraft, and the idle were threatened with punishment. The difficulty, of course, was in finding work when workmen could not find it for themselves—and that difficulty was never overcome.
The Elizabethan law remained in force, with modifications, till 1834, but became less and less fitted to deal with the needs of the country as industrial conditions changed, until during fifty years preceding the Poor Law of 1834 it became gradually swamped by gross abuses. Early in the eighteenth century (1723) the distribution of the funds gathered under the overseers’ levy had become so unsound that indoor relief had to be insisted on as a safeguard, and the applicants were “ offered the House ” as a test of the reality of their poverty. The parish apprenticeship system became a scandal, and a law was passed for the protection of apprentices. But the full inadequacy of the scheme was not revealed until, towards the end of the eighteenth century, three great disturbing influences came simultaneously into operation.
The Changed Economic Conditions that Overthrew the Elizabethan Poor Law
These were, first, the Enclosure Acts, which dispossessed the rural labourers of their common rights and made them wholly dependent on their daily wage. The law that there should be four acres of land to every cottage was repealed. The change of the land into pasturage reduced the number of labourers needed, and’ such as were left largely lost their share in the land through the Enclosure Acts. Between 1710 and 1760 only about three hundred thousand acres were enclosed from the commons, but between 1760 and 1843 nearly seven million acres were enclosed.
Simultaneously with this restriction of rural labour a second great change in urban employment and village industries was going, on through the invention of machinery and the use of steam. Hand labour of all kinds was superseded, and could not be absorbed by the new forms of manufacture, nor could it readily adapt itself to any of the requirements of the period. At the same time such labour as had a chance in the industrial Or agricultural market could not defend itself by combination, for all united action on the part of workmen was forbidden as conspiracy by \he law. This throwing- out of workmen, by shrinkage and change in employment, was accompanied, too, by a great rise in the
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