EXTRACT FROM THE MINORITY REPORT FOR SCOTLAND, GIVING THE REASONS IN FAVOUR OF THE COMPLETE SUPERSESSION OF THE POOR LAW

We realise that the foregoing recommendations amount to the complete supersession of the Poor Law, and, indeed, to its abolition. In its stead, we propose merely an adequate enlargement of the work already undertaken by the various existing public authorities for the prevention of destitution—for the prevention of the destitution due to neglected childhood by the Local Education Authority; for the prevention of the destitution due to preventable sickness, neglected infancy, or uncared-for infirmity by the Local Health Authority; for the prevention of the destitution due to mental defectiveness by the Local Lunacy Authority; for the prevention of the destitution of Old Age by the Local Pension Authority; and for the prevention of the destitution due to unemployment by the new National Authority of which the beginning is seen in the Labour Exchanges Act of 1909. We recommend, in fact, that the community should cease to maintain a special organ for the mere relief of destitution, however caused, and should make such relief as must be given merely incidental to the deliberate prevention of destitution, to which it has, by the creation of public authorities dealing with the several causes of destitution, already set its hand. We now proceed to summarise the main reasons for so radical a change of attitude towards the problem of poverty, and incidentally to answer the more important objections that have been made to it.

The Present Overlap and Duplication of Services in Respect of all Sections of the Destitute

The first reason for dispensing with any special Authority for the relief of destitution as such is a practical one. The work of the Poor Law Authority has to-day been largely superseded, in every branch of its duties, by the activities of the newer forms of Local Government. We have already described, in our proposal for the institution of a Common Register of Public Assistance, and the appointment of a Registrar, the beginnings in Scotland of the same costly overlap of services and duplication of work which have, in England, already reached extravagant proportions. Thus, whereas in 1845, and for some years afterwards, all the public assistance afforded to the sick poor was included in the Poor Law administration, there has gradually been built up, out of the rates, a second medical service, the Public Health department of the County or Burgh. This Public Health Department—in the Highlands, in the Hebrides, and in some of the rural districts still only rudimentary—has, in the large towns, already its own series of hospitals in which the sick poor are maintained as well as treated, entirely free of charge, yet without being paupers. To the long list of diseases already treated in these municipal hospitals, there has now been added phthisis, an illness which accounts for a large proportion of the sick at present dealt with by the Poor Law Authorities. With regard to the children, we see, more or less competing with the Poor Law for their care, on the one hand the Industrial Schools so largely maintained out of the rates and taxes, and on the other the School Boards with the new powers conferred on them by the Education (Scotland) Act of 1908 in connection with the provision of meals and medical inspection. With regard to the aged, we have since 1908 in every County and Burgh a Local Pension Committee awarding domiciliary pensions to no fewer than 70,000 persons over 70, or more than treble the number of aged persons maintained by the Parish Councils as Poor Law Authorities, many, indeed, having been saved from the pauper roll. The removal of the pauper disqualification for a national pension, which has been definitely announced as a subject for legislation in 1910, will make the overlap still more remarkable. With regard to all the persons certifiable as of unsound mind we have the District Boards of Lunacy providing asylums for some, whilst the Parish Councils still deal with others in the Poorhouses, as they do with the uncertified imbeciles, epileptics, and feeble-minded. Finally, with regard to the able-bodied men in distress, for whom the Scottish Poor Law professes not to provide (but nevertheless, as we see, in practice does so as much as the English Poor Law), we find growing up in a score of towns, comprising half the population of Scotland, an organised system of public assistance of one kind or another, under the Distress Committees established by the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905. We see, in town after town, the vagrants, for whom the Parish Council does not provide, relieved in one way or another by the Police. Thus, there is not one section of the host of persons in Scotland who are without the necessaries of life, of whom the Parish Council, as the Poor Law Authority, is to-day left in undisturbed possession. For the care of the children, the sick, the mentally defective, the aged, and the able-bodied unemployed, Parliament has set up, in Scotland as in England, specialised public authorities which deal with the poor, not on account of their destitution, but in respect of the cause or character of their need.

Fortunately, the overlap and confusion caused by these rival services and competing Local Authorities have in Scotland not yet gone far. It is still possible to prevent a waste of expenditure and a confusion of functions that will certainly increase if the growing overlap is not stopped. To us there seems to be but two lines of reform. We may, on the one hand, ask Parliament to arrest the ever-increasing activities of the Local Health Authorities, stop the provision of more isolation hospitals, check the Health Visitors and the crusade against infantile mortality, rescind the recent order of the Local Government Board annexing to their sphere the whole range of tuberculosis, and remit all the sick poor once more to the Parish Council and its Poorhouse. We may propose to repeal the Unemployed Workmen Act and the Old Age Pensions Act, and thrust back the unemployed workmen and the aged into the Poor Law. We may recommend the withdrawal of the new powers given to the School Boards in connection with medical inspection and school meals for hungry children. We may, in fact, propose to revert to the position in 1845, when there was everywhere one Local Authority, and one Local Authority only, to give public assistance to the necessitous poor. We do not think such a course either desirable or politically practicable. We do not believe that any Minister of the Crown will have the hardihood to propose it; we do not believe that Scottish public opinion will tolerate it; we do not believe that any House of Commons will agree to it.

The other alternative seems to us to be, not to reverse but to continue the evolution that has been going on in Local Government, in Scotland as in England. Instead of seeking to curtail the work with regard to children, the sick, the mentally defective, the aged and the able-bodied unemployed, which is now being undertaken by the Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, the Local Lunacy Authorities, the Local Pension Authorities, and the Local Unemployment Authorities, what we recommend is that the remainder of each of these sections of the poor who are still being looked after by the Poor Law Authorities should be transferred to the newer specialised Authorities that have been created.

Just as it is proposed, by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, with the concurrence of practically all acquainted with the problem, to take the persons of unsound mind, including the epileptic and the feeble-minded, quite "out of the Poor Law," and place them entirely in the hands of the Local Lunacy Authority, so it is suggested that all public care of the children of school age should be "taken out of the Poor Law" and transferred to the Local Education Authority; that all public care of the sick and infirm (including the maternity cases, the infants under school age, and the aged requiring institutional care) should be "taken out of the Poor Law," and transferred to the Local Health Authority; and that all the aged who can and will live decently on their pensions should be "taken out of the Poor Law," and dealt with by the Pension Committee—the whole under the control and direction of the Parish School Board or the District Committee, or the County or Town Council as the case may be. There would then remain, out of all the pauper host, only the vagrants and the odds and ends of genuinely able-bodied men who find their way to the Poorhouse. For these who need help to find a situation if they are merely stranded by temporary unemployment, detention colonies if they are idle or vicious, and physical and industrial training if they have to be maintained whilst waiting for a place, we recommend that there should be a new authority of national scope—the government department which is already being set up under the Labour Exchanges Act of 1909, and which should also take over the work of the Distress Committees under the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905. We recommend, therefore, as the only practicable means of preventing a wasteful and demoralising duplication of services, the complete abolition, not only of the Poorhouse, but also of the Poor Law itself.

The Expediency of Preventing the Occurrence of Destitution, rather than merely Relieving it after it has Occurred.

What we propose is no mere change of names or of official machinery. We think the time has come when the nation should definitely adopt the principle of using all its powers to prevent the occurrence of destitution, instead of the principle of merely relieving it after it has occurred. Destitution, as we know, is a social disease, as destructive to the health of the community as phthisis is; quite as dangerous to the individual attacked, once it has gained a firm hold, but fortunately as gradual as phthisis in its attack. The Poor Law Authorities of Scotland have failed to prevent the occurrence of destitution, or even to prevent pauperism, and have been unable to provide what is required for the several sections of persons under their charge, not because the Parish Councillors are incompetent or dishonest, careless or corrupt, but because they have been set, not to this task at all, but merely to that of "relieving destitution." They do relieve destitution much more efficiently on the whole than ever before; but we are not satisfied, nor do we think that public opinion is now satisfied, with the spending in Scotland, year after year, more than a million sterling in the relief of a destitution which never gets either prevented or cured. What the nation now asks is that men, women, and children should, by appropriate measures, be prevented from sinking to a condition of destitution; and that such as unavoidably fall into that state should be taken in hand with a view, not merely to their relief, but to their effectual cure. This is work which a Poor Law authority, by the very nature of its being, can never perform effectively. Any Poor Law authority, call it by what name you may, is necessarily confined to dealing with persons who are actually "destitute" or actually "in distress"; it cannot reach out to anticipate, at the incipient stage, what will, if not arrested in its growth, eventually become destitution or distress. Similarly, a Poor Law authority must necessarily find its operations restricted to the period during which persons are "destitute" or "in distress," though it is precisely some disciplinary "after care" which may be needed to prevent a relapse. In short, except for the purpose of alleviating momentary suffering (for which alone it was originally intended), the money spent in the relief of the destitute, begun only when they are destitute, and discontinued as soon as they cease to be destitute, is simply wasted. If a hospital for the sick could, by the law of its being, only admit cases when "gangrene" had already set in, and had to discharge them the very moment that the "fever" had been reduced, it would effect as few cures of the sick as the Poorhouse does of the destitute. Yet no Poor Law authority, whatever its name, can, in its treatment of the disease of destitution, transcend the corresponding limits.

If we wish to prevent the very occurrence of destitution, and effectively cure it when it occurs, we must look to its causes. Now, deferring for the moment any question of human fallibility, or the "double dose of original sin," which most of us are apt to ascribe to those who succumb in the struggle, the investigations of this Royal Commission reveal three broad roads along one or other of which practically all paupers come, namely: (a) sickness, howsoever caused, (b) neglected infancy and neglected childhood, whosoever may be in fault, and (c) unemployment (including "under-employment"), by whatsoever occasioned. If we could prevent sickness, however caused, or effectually treat it when it occurs; if we could ensure that no child, whatever its parentage, went without what we may call the National Minimum of Nurture and Training; and if we could provide that no able-bodied person was left to suffer from long-continued or chronic unemployment, we should prevent at least nine-tenths of the destitution that now costs the Poor Law Authorities of Scotland more than a million per annum. To break up the Poor Law, and to transfer its several services to the Local Education, Health, Lunacy, and Pension Authorities, and to a national authority for the able-bodied, is to hand over the task of treating curatively the several sections of the destitute to authorities charged with the prevention of the several causes of destitution from which those sections are suffering. This means a systematic attempt to arrest each of the principal causes of eventual destitution at the very outset, in the most incipient stage of its attack, which is always an attack of an individual human being, not of the family as a whole. It is one person, at the outset, who has the cough of incipient phthisis, not a whole family; though if no preventive force is brought to bear, destitution will eventually set in and the whole family will be on our hands. There may be in the family neglected infants, neglected children, or feeble-minded persons lacking proper care or control, who may not be technically destitute, who may even be dependents of able-bodied men in work, but who, if left uncared for, will inevitably become the destitute of subsequent years. Hence it is vital that the Local Health Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure proper treatment for the incipient stages of all diseases. It is vital that the Lunacy Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure proper care and control for all persons certifiable as mentally defective, long before the family to which they belong is reduced to destitution. It is vital that the Local Education Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure, quite irrespective of the family's destitution, whatever Parliament may prescribe as the National Minimum of nurture and training for all children, the neglect of which will otherwise bring these children, when they grow up, themselves to a state of destitution. It is becoming no less clear that some Authority—we say a National Authority—must register and deal with the man who is unemployed, long before extended unemployment has demoralised him and reduced his family to destitution. We wish to put the issue quite clearly before the public. The systematic campaign for the prevention of the occurrence of destitution that we propose—that the community should undertake by grappling with its principal causes at the incipient stages, when they are just beginning to affect one or other members of a family only, long before the family as a whole has sunk into the morass of destitution—involves treating the individual member who is affected in respect of the cause of his complaint, even before he is "disabled" or in pecuniary distress. It means a systematic searching out of incipient cases, just as the Medical Officer of Health searches out infectious disease, or the School Attendance Officer searches out children who are not on the school roll, even before application is made.

At present, the Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, and the Local Lunacy Authorities only feebly and imperfectly grapple with their task of arresting the causes of destitution in the child, the sick person, or the person of unsound mind, partly because they have only lately begun this part of their work, but principally because they have not been legally empowered and legally required to do it. Moreover, they do not yet have forced on their attention, as they would if they had to maintain those who needed to be cured, the extent to which they fail to prevent. If the Health Committee knew that it would have eventually to maintain the sick men whom it allowed to sink gradually into phthisis, as it has now practically to maintain persons who contract smallpox, it would look with a different eye upon the Medical Officer of Health's desire to "search out" every case of incipient phthisis whilst it is yet curable, to press upon the ignorant sufferer the best hygienic advice, and to do what is necessary in order to enable the insidious progress of the disease to be arrested. This does not entail that all diseases shall be treated free, any more than the Public Health supervision of sanitation entails that bad landlords shall have their house drainage provided at the public cost. All the increased activity of the Public Health authorities in searching out and treating sickness may coincide with a systematic enforcement of personal responsibility in respect to personal hygiene and with regard to the maintenance in health of dependents, which we, in fact, recommend. The break-up of the Poor Law implies, in short, not only the adoption of a systematic crusade against the several preventable causes of destitution, but also a far more effective enforcement of parental responsibility than is at present practicable.

It may, however, be objected that there are, at any rate, the families to be dealt with which are now in a state of destitution; and that, moreover, it must be anticipated, even with uniformly good administration of the preventive services, there will not be a few families who, as "missed cases," will have slipped into destitution, without having had their descent arrested by the preventive action above described. We think that each member of even such a family requires, for restoration, specialised treatment according to his or her need. The infant, the child of school age, the mentally defective, the sick, the infirm or incapacitated, the boy or girl above school age, and finally the able-bodied and able-minded adult, each requires that something different should be done for him or her, if that individual is to be properly dealt with. The alternative, namely, to treat the family as a whole, means to place it in the General Mixed Poorhouse, or merely to give it a dole of Outdoor Relief. This, indeed, is to-day the dominant practice; and as such, has been condemned by Majority and Minority alike. It must, we think, be admitted that the several members of the family, with their very different needs, cannot be wisely treated without calling in the public authorities specialising on those heads, such as the Education, Health, Lunacy, Pension, and Unemployment Authorities. This does not mean that the needs of the other members of the family will escape consideration. Assuming that the cause of the destitution in which the family is plunged is the sickness of the breadwinner, and that the other members of the family are all normal, the Health Authority will, if he thinks domiciliary treatment desirable, not only give the necessary medical attendance, and look after the whole family environment by its Health Visitor, but, if there is no income, will grant (subject to the statutory rules and the Council's own Bye-laws) the home aliment that is requisite for the family maintenance. Would any one suggest that the Health Committee, with its Medical Officer and its Health Visitor, should be excluded from this case, or that it should be precluded from treating the case at home when the doctor reports that it can properly be so treated? If there is a mentally defective person in such a family, ought the Lunacy Authority to be kept out? If there are children of school age in it, is it wise to prevent the intervention of the Education Authority and its School Attendance Officer? We suggest that it is the business of the officers of the County or Town Council—in particular the Registrar of Public Assistance whom we have proposed—to see (a) that these Authorities do not overlap, and (b) that they are all consulted as regards such members of the family as come within their respective spheres of treatment. We see no need for any general Poor Law or "Public Assistance Committee" at all.Thus there are two main reasons for the Scheme of Reform that we propose. By breaking up the Poor Law into its component services, and transferring each of these to the organ of government which is already performing the same service for the population at large, we (a) stop the present overlapping and confusion, (b) continue the evolution which has been silently going on in Scotland for a whole generation, and (c) introduce a logical order into both Central and Local Government. But the scheme has a far larger and deeper significance than any increase in administrative efficiency or any promotion of economy and simplicity in Local Government. The reform that we advocate, by emphasising everywhere the Principle of Prevention, and especially by systematically searching out neglected infancy and childhood, preventable sickness, uncontrolled feeble-mindedness and uncared-for epilepsy, unwarded vagrancy and that hopeless worklessness that is so demoralising to mind and body, brings with it the sure and certain hope that we may, at no distant date, by patient and persistent effort on these lines, remove from our midst the intolerable infamy to a Christian and civilised State of the persistence of a mass of chronic destitution, spreading like a cancerous growth from one generation to another of our fellow-citizens.

The "Moral Factor" in Destitution

Such being the grounds for our proposals, we have sought to weigh and appreciate the various arguments that can be urged against them. The most radical objection, and we infer the most deeply felt, against the Supersession of the Poor Law Authority by the various specialised and preventive Authorities that are already at work, seems to be a conviction that, in proposing to treat the problem of destitution as one of Sickness or Mental Defect, of Infirmity or Old Age, of Unemployment or Neglected Childhood, we are ignoring the "moral factor." It is alleged that, among all paupers, notwithstanding the different roads by which they may have come to destitution, there is a certain moral taint; and that, in view of the importance of properly treating this defect of character, all paupers, whatever their age or sex or physical or mental condition ought to be dealt with by an authority specialising on this defect; and this, it is assumed, is what the Poor Law Authority is, or should be made to become. In order that we may be quite sure that we are stating this objection fairly, we quote the exact words of the most accomplished opponent of our proposals, Professor Bernard Bosanquet:—

"The antagonism cannot be put too strongly. The Majority proceed upon the principle that where there is a failure of social self-maintenance in the sense above defined, there is a defect in the citizen character, or at least a grave danger to its integrity; add that therefore every case of this kind raises a problem which is "moral," in the sense of affecting the whole capacity of self-management, to begin with, in the person who has failed, and secondarily, in the whole community so far as influenced by expectation and example. This relation to a man's whole capacity for self-management, his "moral," is a distinctive feature, I take it, which separates the treatment required by the destitute or necessitous from anything that can be offered to citizens who are maintaining themselves in a normal course of life."[865]

In this cogent argument for the retention of the Category of the Destitute, and of one Authority, and one Authority only, for all classes of destitute persons, we see two distinct and separate assumptions, one as to fact, and the other as to social expediency. We have first the suggestion that, in all classes of persons who need maintenance at the hands of the State, there is, as a matter of fact, a moral defect, common to the whole class, and requiring specific treatment. Secondly, we see creeping out from behind this suggestion, a further assumption as to the policy which ought to be pursued by the Poor Law Authority. This Authority, which is to have in its charge all the heterogeneous population of infants, children, sick and mentally defective persons, the aged and the infirm, the widows, the vagrants, and the unemployed, is to treat them, not with a single eye to what is best calculated to turn them, or any of them, into efficient citizens, not even with a single eye to what will most successfully remedy the "moral defect" which they are assumed all to possess, but with the quite different object of warning off or deterring, "by expectation and example," other persons for applying for like treatment. In other words, we must, by keeping all the different varieties of people who require State aid under one Authority, and under one that assumes the existence of this "moral defect," retain for all alike, not only the "stigma of pauperism," but also a method of provision which will "deter" others from coming to be treated. As this is the only philosophical argument that we have encountered, by way of justification for the existence of one Authority, and one Authority only, to which the State should indiscriminately commit the care of the infants, the children of school age, the sick, the mentally defective, the aged and infirm, the vagrants and the unemployed workmen in distress, it requires detailed examination.

Let us first examine the initial assumption that the miscellaneous multitude who, year by year, come on public funds for maintenance, are, as a matter of fact, one and all, characterised by a particular moral defect—a feature so uniform, so important, and so specific as to outweigh the differences between infants and adults, the healthy and the sick, the sane and the mentally defective, the aged and the able-bodied; and to require the aggregation of all of them together under a single Authority in each locality, which should specialise upon this common characteristic. We have, in the first place, to realise that two-fifths of all the paupers are infants or children of school age; that is to say, human beings rendered destitute, not by any action or inaction of their own, but through something which has happened to their parents or guardians. An enormous proportion of these children are destitute merely because they are orphans. What rational ground have we for assuming, without enquiry, that these little ones are suffering from any "defect in the citizen character," or from any "moral" defect whatsoever? Their fathers may well have had defects, for they have died; though even with regard to them the more obvious inference would seem to be that they had physical defects or weaknesses; and this, in view of the frequency of mere accident, cannot be deduced with any certainty. We can, at any rate, infer nothing as to the character of the mothers from the fact that the fathers have died. Moreover, even if we could make the assumption that the children of fathers who have died prematurely, or who from some other cause have left their offspring without property, necessarily inherited some weakness of character or specific moral defect, it does not seem to follow that the best way of counteracting this inheritance would be to herd such children together, to segregate them apart from normal children, to brand them as paupers, and to commit them to the care of an Authority not specially concerned with dealing with children as children, but regarding children as only one variety of the pauper class. It seems clear that the real justification for keeping together all the infants and children whom the State has to maintain, and for excluding them from the care of the Local Education Authority, is not any consideration of what is likely to be best for such children—not even what is best calculated to counteract any disadvantageous tendencies that some of them may have inherited—but the second assumption to which we drew attention, namely, that it is expedient so to treat those whom the State must maintain that other persons will not, "by expectation and example," be led to apply for similar treatment. The argument, in short, is really one for affixing the "stigma of pauperism" to all the children that the State has to maintain, not because this will make them grow up into efficient citizens—even, perhaps, at the cost of injuriously affecting their education and their character—but in order merely to prevent other children becoming chargeable. This policy of definitely "Poor Law treatment" for the Children of the State, the Scottish Parish Councils, to their honour, have always repudiated. But if this policy of "Poor Law treatment" of the child is repudiated—if the State is really to set itself to bring up the boys and girls whom it finds on its hands with a single eye to their development into efficient citizens—why should the State not use for them the organ which it has fashioned for this very purpose? What ground is there for treating the child as a pauper at all, when the Local Education Authority stands there, in every parish, already authorised by law to provide all that is requisite, and prepared to treat the child simply as a child?

Passing from the two-fifths of the paupers who are infants or children, we have then to realise that something like another two-fifths of all those who, in Scotland, apply for maintenance are not merely "disabled" in the technical sense, but are definitely suffering from some specific disease or chronic infirmity of body, for which they have to be medically treated. If the patient happens to be suffering from certain diseases, which are specified in an ever-lengthening schedule, the argument about the "defect in the citizen character," and the "grave danger to its integrity" is abandoned; the sick person is then, by common consent, searched out, urged to accept State aid, freely maintained at the public expense, and—what is very significant to us in this argument—treated without the slightest pretence that he has a moral defect, and without any idea of curing that defect, or avoiding the danger to his integrity, but simply and solely with the object of restoring him at the earliest moment to physical health. Meanwhile the responsible Authority is at work effecting, by cleansing, disinfecting, draining, and improving the housing, the water-supply, and the general sanitation, alterations in the environment in which the disease has occurred, in order to prevent its recurrence, either in that patient or in any one else. The patients of the Local Health Authority, though their numbers are growing day by day, the Majority Report leaves outside the "one Authority and only one Authority" which (as it is suggested) ought to deal with all those for whom maintenance has to be provided. Whilst we on the Poor Law Commission were deliberating, the Local Government Board for Scotland added to this class all the enormous number of persons suffering from tuberculosis.[866] In spite of the fact that the more enterprising of the Parish Councils are already beginning to provide extensively for phthisis patients in their Poorhouses, the work is now to be undertaken by the Local Health Authorities. We note that the Majority Report makes no protest against this enormous extension of the area of overlap between the two sets of Authorities, and expressly assumes that, to the extent that tuberculosis prevails among the present pauper host, the Poor Law is to be broken up, and its functions gradually taken over by the Local Health Authorities. Apparently it is admitted that, with regard to persons suffering from tuberculosis in any of its forms, we must give up the assumption that they have some "defect in the citizen character," in common with the vagrants and the unemployed workmen; or at any rate we must give up any idea of treating them for this moral defect or grave danger to their integrity.

What the public welfare requires is, as is now admitted, that these sick persons should be treated with a single eye to arresting the course of their disease, and restoring them as soon as possible to physical health. Moreover, as sickness is plainly, to an undefined extent, the result of bad environment—of overcrowding, insanitation, unwholesome food, polluted water, or injurious conditions of employment—it is important that it should be in the hands of an authority officially cognisant of this environment, and empowered to alter that which is producing the sickness. The question necessarily arises whether there is any ground for dealing with any neglected sick persons who need medical treatment, in any different way from that in which we have now decided to treat phthisis patients—whether we have any more ground for assuming the co-existence of a "defect in the citizen character" or "grave danger to its integrity," along with cancer, rheumatism, lead poisoning, hernia, or varicose veins, than along with pulmonary consumption—whether, in fact, the State has any justification for treating any sick person at all otherwise than with a single eye to arresting their diseases and preventing their occurrence in others—whether in the interests of the community as a whole we are not bound to drop the idea of "deterring" the sick "by expectation and example" from coming to be cured, and are not bound therefore to put the whole function into the hands of the organ which the State has created for the prevention and treatment of disease, namely, the Local Health Authority?

When we turn to the aged, who make up the bulk of the remainder of the pauper host, the question of whether or not we can assume the universal existence of a "defect in the citizen character" or "grave danger to its integrity" becomes irrelevant. As there can, speaking practically, be no idea of improving the character of the aged, it is difficult to see why it should be suggested that the worn-out men and women for whom the State has to provide, and whose moral defects cannot now be cured, should necessarily be merged with the persons whose assumed moral defects are still curable, and who are therefore to be placed under an Authority specialising on this business of treating the "defect in the citizen character" that always accompanies the need for State maintenance. In the case of the aged, in fact, the assumption that they should be placed under a Poor Law Authority with a view to remedying their assumed defects becomes hypocritical. In their case, it is clear, their retention in the class "pauper," and their relegation to the Poor Law Authority, is advocated, not for their own good. They are, it is suggested, to be accorded a treatment other than that which the State would otherwise afford to them—that is to say, they are to suffer the stigma of pauperism—merely in order "by expectation and example" to deter other persons from taking advantage in their old age of the maintenance which the State affords. This policy we are relieved from having to characterise, because by the passing of the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, the community has, even whilst we were deliberating, definitely declared against it. We see, therefore, no need whatsoever, now that there is in every County and Burgh a special Authority for the aged (the Local Pension Committee), for relegating any aged persons to the Poor Law Authority.

Of the non-able-bodied paupers—and it is for the non-able-bodied that the Scottish Poor Law lawfully provides—there remain only "the feeble-minded," and the epileptic, and the persons of "unsound mind," who make up nearly one-fifth of the whole of Scottish pauperism. Of this fifth, about two-thirds are already under the administrative care, not of the Poor Law Authority at all, but of the Local Lunacy Authority, whilst about one-third (including the epileptics, the uncertified imbeciles, and the merely feeble-minded) are still looked after by the Parish Councils. All these persons, we must admit, actually do have, co-existing with their pauperism, a "defect in the citizen character," a mental weakness frequently "moral" in its nature, and one which is coming more and more to be regarded as susceptible to appropriate treatment. Here then, if anywhere, one might think that there is ground for assigning these paupers to the Authority which is by its supporters assumed to specialise on the treatment of the specific "defect in the citizen character," which is asserted to be co-extensive with the need for State maintenance. But the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, after exhaustively examining the subject and concentrating its whole attention upon it, came to the conclusion that the Poor Law Authority was inherently unsuited for treating any kind of mentally defective person, and decided to recommend the removal of all such persons from the sphere of the Poor Law, and their being placed henceforth entirely in the hands of an Authority, the Local Lunacy Authority, which had both the special knowledge and the special machinery for treating the mental defectiveness that had been actually proved to exist, rather than the hypothetical "defect in the citizen character" that their need of State maintenance is supposed to imply. Our colleagues who have signed the Majority Report, torn between their own assumption of the need for "one Authority and only one Authority" for all the destitute, and the very authoritative recommendations of the contemporary Royal Commission, have apparently been unable to come to any certain conclusion as to what they wish done with regard to this one-fifth of all the paupers. In the Majority Report for England and Wales, dated February 1909, our colleagues concurred with us in recommending the carrying out of the proposals of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded; in desiring the transfer of all provision for the mentally defective to the Local Lunacy Authorities; in urging the removal from this unfortunate class of the "stigma of pauperism," and in so far "breaking up the Poor Law," and departing from the idea of relegating all who needed State maintenance to "one Authority and one Authority only," which should treat them all for their assumed common "defect in the citizen character."[867]In the case of Ireland, where the lunatic asylums are at present entirely outside the Poor Law, and their inmates are not paupers, our colleagues, in their Majority Report, dated June 1909, recommended exactly the opposite course from that which they proposed for England and Wales. Instead of transferring the feeble-minded to the Local Lunacy Authority, they recommended that the Local Lunacy Authority should cease to exist as a separate Authority; and that all the lunatics and lunatic asylums should be transferred, along with the unemployed workmen and the infectious sick, to the new Authority that they wish to administer the Poor Law. When we come to Scotland, our colleagues, in their Majority Report dated October 1909, made no recommendations on the subject at all as to the Authority;[868] and are therefore in the position of implicitly endorsing the status quo, which, as we have mentioned, is one of overlap between the Poor Law and Lunacy Authorities, each of which has under its administrative care a certain proportion of the lunatics, idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, and feeble-minded for whom Scotland has to provide, and with regard to some of whom very inadequate provision is now made. We cannot agree to leave the matter in this way. We do not see that the nature of lunacy or feeble-mindedness differs in the three Kingdoms to such an extent as to warrant three different policies in its treatment. We think that the first mind of our colleagues was the best. We, like the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, see no reason why lunatics should be treated as paupers any more than as criminals. We certainly see no reason why Scottish lunatics and feeble-minded should remain paupers, when English lunatics and feeble-minded are to be relieved from this stigma. We, therefore, think that Scotland should see to it that the mentally defective of all grades are, at the earliest possible moment, wholly removed from the Poor Law and the Poor Law Authority, and placed entirely under the care of the special Lunacy Authority, which can deal with them with a single eye to the needs of their condition.

We proceed now to consider the last section of all, the adult able-bodied man or woman without means, who becomes destitute through not being in employment at wages. We think that it is invidious and unwarranted to assume that such unemployment is, in any particular case, wholly or even mainly the result of any "defect of the citizen character." We have been unable to resist the evidence that unemployment, and even acute distress from unemployment, comes, as a matter of fact, to workmen of excellent skill and character. We have been much impressed, amid the heterogeneous crowd of "the unemployed," by the number of worthy and capable men who have found themselves thrown out of long-held situations by the bankruptcy of their employers, by some change of industrial process, by the invention of a new machine, or by the decay of particular industries. In these cases, as has been well brought out by Mr. W. H. Beveridge,[869] the very excellence of the workman, by his long continuance in the groove to which the employer has required him to fit, may have rendered him less capable of obtaining another situation, and even less able to fill it when found. Notwithstanding the frequency of cases of this sort, it is, we think, clear that a majority of those who, in any given state of trade, come into distress through long-continued unemployment or chronic "under-employment," are—with many individual exceptions—either the less strong or the less fit, the less skilled or the less capable, the less responsible or the less regular in their industry of the wage-earning community. Hence though it is the relative defectiveness of the social environment (such as the lack of organisation of the Labour Market, or the anarchic fluctuations of trade) that in the main determine the amount of Under-employment, or the degree to which Under-employment prevails, at any given place and time, it is the relative defectiveness of one wage-earner as compared with another that in the main determines upon which individuals the Unemployment or Under-employment will actually fall. This fact, though it does not relieve us from the necessity of providing for these individuals, serves as a warning against certain proposed methods of provision. Moreover, whilst persons cannot voluntarily become infants or children, or aged or mentally defective, in order to qualify for the provision which the State makes for these sections, and are not likely to make themselves acutely sick or permanently infirm in order to get medically treated, even if this incidentally includes their maintenance, there is an obvious danger that the lower types of men will tend to become destitute through chronic unemployment, if "by expectation and example" they see any chance of maintenance without sustained effort, under conditions as pleasant to them as work at wages. Hence, in the case of the able-bodied, it is true that the result of the State provision on the amount and quality of productive effort, not only in the persons treated, but also in all those who might "by expectation and example" be led to apply for treatment, becomes the paramount consideration.

The suggestion that "where there is a failure of social self-maintenance ... there is a defect in the citizen character, or at least a grave danger to its integrity," is, indeed, in any careful analysis, seen to be true, if at all, of the able-bodied and of the able-bodied only. It is exactly because we realise the overwhelming importance to the character of the community of stimulating, in all sections of the able-bodied, the desire and faculty for self-maintenance, that we urge the necessity of having an Authority dealing with the able-bodied, and with the able-bodied only. It is, we suggest, just because the Parish Council, as a Poor Law Authority, has been required to be simultaneously a Hospital Authority for the sick, an Asylum Authority for the mentally defective, an Education Authority for the children, and a Pension Authority for the aged, that it has never been able to deal efficiently with the able-bodied. If it had been able to keep its Poorhouse exclusively for the able-bodied—even for the able-bodied whom the medical officer felt obliged to certify as temporarily disabled lest they should starve to death—it might, at any rate, by appropriate discipline, have stopped the Poorhouse from becoming a visible source of deterioration of the able-bodied inmates. The inference, therefore, that we draw from the argument as to the "moral factor" in destitution, of which, in the case of the able-bodied, we recognise the full force, is that it is imperative that there should be, not one Authority for all persons needing public assistance, whatever their age, sex, or condition, but one Authority for all the adult able-bodied persons who are not specially certified as sick or permanently incapacitated, as mentally defective, or as having attained a specified limit of age. We regard the wise treatment of all such adult able-bodied persons as have to be maintained from public funds as being of such great difficulty and complexity as to demand, not only that it should be the work of a single Authority specialising on their problem, but also that this Authority should be one free from the influences of particular localities, and able to command the highest administrative skill that the nation can supply.

There is an additional reason for not thrusting the able-bodied unemployed person into the hands of a new Poor Law Authority restricted to the function of relieving destitution. Up to the present, the Scottish Poor Law has not included any provision whatsoever for the able-bodied, the only lawful method of relief from public funds being that afforded by the Distress Committee under the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905. Hence the famous principle of the English Poor Law reform of 1834—that the condition of the able-bodied pauper should always be less eligible than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer—has never been adopted by the administrators of the Scottish Poor Law. To transfer, as is proposed by our colleagues in the Majority Report, the whole responsibility for the able-bodied unemployed from the Distress Committees to a new Poor Law, or, as they say, Public Assistance Authority, would, we think, inevitably tend to introduce into Scotland a principle which has, in England, proved a complete failure. We now see that the condition of the lowest grade of independent labourer—whether he is chronically "under-employed" like the whole class of dock and other casual labourers, or "sweated" like the home-working chair-maker or slipper-maker—is so deplorably below the level of adequate subsistence that to make the lot of the pauper "less eligible" means to reduce him below any acceptable standard of civilised existence. It has been found, in fact, impossible to give the pauper less food, less clothing, less rest and sleep, or less eligible housing accommodation than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer without actually and obviously impairing his physical health. Hence the alternative has been to concentrate the "less eligibility" on the conditions of the pauper's mental life. However worthy and innocent have been the able-bodied applicants for Poor Law relief, the policy of the English Poor Law has been to degrade them in their own eyes and in the eyes of the public, to exclude them from citizenship by depriving them (though not the convicted criminals) of the right to be placed on the electoral register; to subject them to hard labour of the most monotonous and useless character, such as stone-breaking or corn-grinding, or even oakum-picking; to subject them to the shameful promiscuity of the General Mixed Workhouse or the gaol-like severities of the Able-bodied Test Workhouse; and this "deterrent" treatment has, by the very principles of the Poor Law, had to be meted out to all comers, whether or not they have been found, as a matter of fact, to have any moral defect at all. This "principle of less eligibility" has been, in fact, in the English Poor Law, a mere device for mechanically diminishing, "by expectation and example," able-bodied pauperism—meaning help from the Poor Rate. It has been found wholly ineffective (and has, indeed, stood in the way of the adoption of anything effective) for diminishing the able-bodied destitution which leads presently to pauperism, as well as for striking at the causes which bring men to this destitution. This policy of "less eligibility," into which any Poor Law Authority is only too apt to be driven in dealing with the able-bodied, seems to us so futile and so barbarous in its inhumanity, and leads to such demoralising forms of parasitism on the labour of women and children, on begging and vagrancy, and even on a career of crime, that we should regard its introduction into Scotland, by the new Public Assistance Authorities that our colleagues propose, as nothing less than a national disaster.

We think that the time has come for the nation definitely to repudiate the policy of "deterring" persons who are destitute from coming under the care and control of the State; and this equally when the destitute persons are able-bodied and when they are sick or mentally defective. We urge the deliberate adoption of the opposite principle of searching out those who are in any respect destitute, with a view to taking hold of their cases at the earliest possible moment, when they may still be curable, and of enforcing on all able-bodied persons the obligation to maintain themselves and their dependants in health and efficiency. We consider that it is now possible to proceed with regard to unemployment on the same general lines as we proceed with regard to illiteracy in children and with regard to infectious disease. We recommend that, by the systematic enforcement of parental responsibility for the condition of all dependants by the Local Education Authority and the Local Health Authority, and by the systematic suppression of mendicity and vagrancy by the Local Police Authority, every person who is not in a position to provide for his wife and children, or who wilfully or negligently abstains from doing so, should—whether or not he applies for assistance—stand revealed to the new Authority that we propose for dealing with the able-bodied. By an organised use of the National Labour Exchange this Authority will be able to ascertain whether there are possibilities of employment for such men, and where such openings are, and what is the kind of training that they require. If resort to the National Labour Exchange becomes general among employers, and if it is made compulsory on those who take on hands for casual jobs, it will be possible for the Authority so to "dovetail" jobs and seasonal occupations as to go far towards ensuring continuous employment for those who are taken on at all. There will remain the persons who by this very "decasualisation" of labour and suppression of chronic "under-employment" are squeezed out of their present miserable partial earnings. For these it must be the duty of the National Authority to provide, and, as soon as possible, absorb them in productive industry. Fortunately there is at hand in the diminution of boy labour by the increasing absorption of the boy's time in technical education, in the reduction of excessive hours of labour on railways, tramways, and omnibuses, and in the withdrawal of the mothers of young children from the labour market when they are required, as a condition of their aliment, to devote themselves to their family, together with the possibilities of development opened up by afforestation, etc., which we have elsewhere sufficiently described, more than enough opportunities for the absorption of this temporary surplus. But the cyclical fluctuations of trade, with the consequent waxing and waning of the aggregate demand of productive industry, must always be counted on; and these cyclical fluctuations in demand for labour, as we have shown, can be counteracted, and the volume of wage-earning employment in the country as a whole maintained at something like a constant level, by a mere rearrangement over each decade, of the Government works and orders that must in any case be executed within the decade, though not necessarily, as at present, in equal instalments year by year. All this organised attempt to prevent unemployment, which we regard as the primary duty of the National Authority, though we have reason to believe that it can obviate the greater part of the involuntary lack of work from which so many of the wage-earners now suffer, will not, of course, completely secure every individual workman in permanent employment. To provide for such cases we look, in the main, to a great extension of Trade Union insurance, rendered possible to many more industries than can yet organise "out of work benefit" by adequate subventions from public funds on the lines of the well-known Ghent system. Finally, when all this is done, the National Authority for the able-bodied will still have on its hands those who are for one reason or another uninsured, and for whom, whether from their own faults or defects or not, the Labour Exchange fails to find a situation. But even these must not be deterred from coming under care and control, and must, in the public interest, not be kept at arm's length to degenerate or become demoralised. For them the National Authority must provide maintenance, with adequate Home Aliment for their dependants, in the way that we have described, and under the course of physical and industrial training best calculated to make them more fit than they now are for the work which the Labour Exchange will, sooner or later, be able to find for them. We see no reason for penal conditions, such as have prevailed in the English Able-bodied Test Workhouses, for any honest and willing man. Only when a man has been definitely proved to be unwilling to work for the maintenance of himself and his dependants, or persists in recalcitrancy and refusal to co-operate in his own cure, need he be committed by the magistrates to a Detention Colony, there to be treated in whatever way is found best adapted to remedy the moral defect which he will then have been actually convicted of possessing.

To sum up, we hold it untrue and unwarranted to suggest that all those whom the State finds on its hands as destitute—the infants and children, the sick and the mentally defective, the aged and the unemployed able-bodied—have necessarily any moral taint or defect in common, for which they need all to be treated by a single Authority, or can properly all be treated by such an authority, specialising on this presumed common attribute. We hold, on the contrary, that experience has demonstrated that, although individuals in all sections of the destitute may be morally defective, and this in all sorts of different ways, the great mass of destitution is the direct and (given human nature as it is) almost inevitable result of the social environment in which the several sections have found themselves; and that it can, to a large and as yet undefined extent, be obviated if the cases are taken in time, and the environment appropriately changed. We suggest that the failure of the existing Poor Law Authorities is due mainly to the fact that, as Poor Law Authorities, they are inherently incapable of getting hold of the cases in time before destitution has set in, and that they are necessarily prevented, by their very nature as "Destitution Authorities," from changing the social environment which is bringing about the destitution, or from providing the new environment that is necessary, whether by way of treatment or by way of disciplinary supervision after actual treatment, either for the infants or for the children, for the sick or for the mentally defective, for the aged and infirm or for the unemployed able-bodied. We consider that it is proved, by the experience of the several specialised and preventive Authorities that have been established for this purpose, that the arrest of the causes of destitution, and the necessary changes in the social environment, can be effected only by making each such Authority responsible for its own special part of the work of prevention, and for providing the appropriate treatment for the particular section of persons in whom it may have failed to prevent destitution. We fully admit the importance of the "moral factor" in contributing to the production of some of the destitution in all the sections; but the moral defect is not always in the destitute person himself, and we hold that this "moral factor" can never be effectually dealt with, and can never be subjected to the disciplinary and reformatory treatment that it requires, until we give up assuming its existence where we have no actual proof, and until we are prepared to base such treatment solely upon the definite conviction, by judicial process, of particular individuals for particular offences. In no case, whether individually innocent or morally guilty, do we think that the destitute person should be refused treatment, or "deterred" from applying for it. On the contrary, we hold that every destitute person not under treatment is a menace to the commonweal; and the public authorities should therefore search out all such cases, as if they were cases of typhus, and endeavour to get hold of them at the most incipient stage of the disease. And if we are asked what we would substitute for the "deterrent" treatment of the Poor Law, in order to protect the State from being eaten up by a multitude of applicants for its aid, we reply that in no case do we suggest the provision of maintenance, or of any form of public assistance, otherwise than in the guise of the most appropriate treatment for the actual disease or infirmity or lack that the individual is demonstrated to be suffering from; that this treatment is not necessarily gratuitous, efficient provision being made for recovery of cost wherever there is ability to pay; that such treatment is never unconditional, and is from the very nature of the case disciplinary; that it necessarily includes long-continued supervision, even after treatment; and that co-operation in one's own cure, together with willingness to fulfil all parental, marital, and personal obligations, opportunity to doing so being provided, will for the first time be really enforced, and if necessary enforced, when other means have failed, by commitment to a Detention Colony.

Summary of Conclusions

It is on all these grounds that we feel compelled to dissent from the recommendations of the Majority Report in favour of setting up a new Destitution Authority, which should administer relief only at the period of destitution, and which should have under its charge indiscriminately men, women, and children, the sick and the healthy, the infant and the aged, the unemployed workman and the incorrigible vagrant. We believe that the establishment of any such general Destitution Authority, under whatever designation, and however selected or appointed, would inevitably lead to the perpetuation of the General Mixed Poorhouse, and the customary dole of Aliment or Outdoor Relief. We cannot but fear that such a proposal means the abandonment of any hope of preventing the occurrence of Unemployment and the gradual sinking into destitution that we see going on; that it implies practically a despairing acquiescence in the daily manufacture of "unemployables," and in the daily creation of new pauperism, which is the disquieting feature of the time. We, on the contrary, believe that destitution can be prevented, and that it is the business of the State, in its national and local organisation, to take the steps necessary to prevent it. In this dissent we have confined ourselves to argument as to the general principle. We have not attempted to make definite and detailed recommendations as to how the principle of breaking up the Poor Law, and transferring its several services to the specialised preventive Authorities, should be applied to the present machinery of administration in Scotland. We do not feel qualified, for instance, to decide whether the care of the children can be best entrusted wholly to the School Boards, or whether, with a view to an equalisation of the rates, this work might advantageously be shared in by the County Committees of districts under the Education (Scotland) Act of 1908. We do not pretend to advise whether the District Boards of Lunacy, with the new duties with regard to the feeble-minded, and the complete disconnection of all their work from the Poor Law recommended by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, as well as by ourselves, should or should not be modified in constitution; or whether it might not be more advantageous for Scotland, and more calculated to relieve its local administration from an onerous and unequally distributed burden, if the whole work of providing for the mentally defective were made a national service and a national charge. With regard to the Local Health organisation, which has in some parts of Scotland to cope with great geographical difficulties, we do not feel warranted in making any definite recommendation as to the constitutions, areas, and powers of the present Health Authority in Burghs and Counties respectively. Nor do we think it necessary to pronounce upon the question of whether the National Department for the Able-bodied—with its Labour Exchanges, its help towards Insurance against Unemployment, its duty in regularising the seasonal trades and "decasualising" casual labour, its work in promoting the absorption of the surplus labourers who may be thus squeezed out, its attempts to regularise the aggregate national demand for labour, and its training establishments and Detention Colonies—should be separate and self-contained for Scotland, or whether it might not, like the Board of Trade and the Factory Inspection Department, more advantageously form part of the wider organisation for the United Kingdom as a whole. All these are administrative details to be determined by those personally acquainted with Scottish Local Government, and in accordance with Scottish public opinion. We must content ourselves with suggesting that, if it is thought that the time has come when we need no longer rest satisfied with merely relieving destitution, but can start an effective campaign for its prevention; if it is felt that the children ought to be rescued from demoralisation and the sick from preventable disease and preventable suffering; if it is desired to put an end to the demoralisation and destruction of character now caused by Unemployment, and especially by Under-employment, then we must proceed generally upon the lines herein laid down.

We therefore recommend:—

1. That the Scottish Poor Law be abolished, and in its stead an entirely different method of provision for those needing public aid be inaugurated, so as to get rid of pauperism, both the name and the thing.

2. That a systematic Crusade against Destitution in all its forms be set on foot; against the destitution caused by Unemployment, the destitution caused by Old Age, the destitution caused by Feeble-mindedness and Lunacy, the destitution caused by Ill-health and Disease, and the destitution caused by Neglected Infancy and Neglected Childhood.

3. That the Local Education Authority be empowered and required to search out all children of school age within its district who are destitute of proper nurture, and to secure to them a fitting upbringing.

4. That the Local Health Authority be empowered and required to search out all sick persons within its district who are destitute of medical attendance, all infants destitute of proper nurture, and all infirm persons needing medical attendance and nursing, and to apply the appropriate treatment, either in the homes or in suitable institutions.

5. That the Lunacy Authority be empowered and required to search out all feeble-minded and mentally defective persons destitute of proper care and control, and to make appropriate provision for them.

6. That the Local Pension Authority be empowered and required to search out all persons within its district who are destitute from old age, and to provide Old Age Pensions for such of them as are able and willing to live decently thereon.

7. That a new National Authority be empowered and required to search out all able-bodied persons destitute of employment; to take the necessary steps both to diminish, as far as practicable, the social disease of Unemployment, and to supply proper maintenance and training for those who are unemployed and unprovided for.

8. That all these specialised and preventive Authorities be empowered and required to enforce, by counsel and warning, by the sustained pressure of public opinion, and where needed by process of law, the obligation of all able-bodied persons to maintain themselves and their families in due health and efficiency.