Act 1898; or (iv.) a parent of the child has been sentenced to
imprisonment in respect of any offence against any of his or her children; or (v.) a parent of the child is permanently bedridden or disabled, and is the inmate of a workhouse, and consents to the resolution hereinafter mentioned; or (vi.) both the parents (or in the case of an illegitimate child, the mother of the child) are (or is) dead; the guardians may, at any time, resolve that until the child reaches the age of eighteen years, all the rights and powers of such parent as aforesaid, or, if both parents are dead, of the parents, in respect of the child shall, subject as in this Act mentioned, vest in the guardians." Penalties were also enacted against any person who shall knowingly assist or induce any child adopted by the guardians to leave their control. If any child maintained by the guardians is, with their consent, adopted by some other person, their responsibility for the child does not at once cease, for they are required, during three years after the date of the adoption, to cause the child to be visited at least twice a year, by some person appointed by them for the purpose; and they have the power, if they see fit, to revoke their consent to the adoption, and reassume custody of the child.[658]
[658] Poor Law Act, 1899, 62 & 63 Vic. c. 37, secs. 1-3.
Some boards of guardians--often on the suggestion of the inspectorate--promptly made use of their new powers. On 1st June 1902, the number of children already adopted up to that date was no fewer than 7724, of whom 1503 were then over fifteen.[659] It is to be noted that, though the powers are applicable to all pauper children, the Central Authority has not suggested their use except in respect of the children in Poor Law institutions (including, however, the "ins and outs"),[660] together with those technically "boarded out," or in certified schools; and we do not find that they have ever been made use of for any of the children maintained by the guardians on outdoor relief, however disastrous is their upbringing.
[659] Thirty-second Annual Report, 1902-3, pp. lxii-lxiii.
[660] _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1903-4, by W. A. Casson, 1905 p. 45.
_E._--THE SICK
We broke off the description of the policy of the Central Authority with regard to the sick with the suggestive quotation from the Annual Report of the Poor Law Board in 1870, over Mr. Goschen's signature. "The economical and social advantages," said the last President of the Poor Law Board, "of free medicine to the poorer classes generally as distinguished from actual paupers, and perfect accessibility to medical advice at all times under thorough organisation, may be considered as so important in themselves as to render it necessary to weigh with the greatest care all the reasons which may be adduced in their favour."[661]
[661] Twenty-second Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1869-70, p. lii.
(i.) _Domiciliary Treatment_
So far as published documents go, we cannot find that any inquiry was made by the Local Government Board (at any rate on its Poor Law side) as to the advantage and feasibility of this suggestion of providing free medical assistance, under thorough organisation, to the poorer classes generally. There was no breach of continuity in the policy, begun in 1865, of transforming the provision for the sick paupers in the workhouse, into elaborately equipped, adequately staffed, and separately administered general hospitals, which were called Poor Law infirmaries. But in the general crusade against outdoor relief, initiated by the able and zealous inspectorate in 1871, there was no exception made for outdoor medical relief.[662] There was accordingly (just as we have shown to be the case in regard to widows and the aged) no limitation, corresponding to the express exceptions of the General Orders in favour of the sick, in the phrases condemnatory of outdoor relief generally, which are to be found in the Annual Reports and Circulars of these years. The inspectors, it is clear, made no distinction, in their persistent pressure against "outdoor relief," between medical and other relief, between hygienic advice and money doles. Mr. Longley, indeed, went so far as to condemn, expressly because it provided medical relief otherwise than in the workhouse, the whole system of Poor Law dispensaries which the Central Authority had itself just initiated and practically forced on the Metropolitan Boards of Guardians.[663] This report of Mr. Longley's was honoured by notice in the annual volume, and commended by the Local Government Board for "careful consideration."[664] There is, therefore, some warrant for the inference that the Local Government Board, under Mr. Stansfeld and Mr. Sclater-Booth, had not only put aside the suggestion of providing free medical attendance for the poorer classes generally, but also that it had now become the policy of the Central Authority--so far as we can discover, for the first time since 1834--to restrict, as far as possible, even such domiciliary medical attendance as was being given under the Poor Law to the sick poor.
[662] Mr. Longley, indeed, in his Report on the Administration of Outdoor Relief in the Metropolis, seems to allude to the official dictum of the Poor Law Board under Mr. Goschen, in favour of "free medicine to the poorer classes generally." He sternly condemns "any gradual drifting into a system of medical State charity," and deprecates the fact that this tendency "has received higher sanction than that of the prevalent belief of the poor, or even of the practice of Boards of Guardians" (Third Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1873-4, p. 161).
[663] "The dispensary system should be regarded, in common with every improved form of out-relief, not as a final object of Poor Law administration, but merely as a means of administering with greater efficiency that legal relief which, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, is most safely and effectually given in the form of indoor relief. It would, of course, be idle, and worse than idle, to stifle all attempts to reform the administration of out-relief, on the ground that it is desirable, and may, at some remote period, be possible to abolish, or at least greatly to curtail it; and no reform of the practice of relief was probably more urgently needed, or has proved more effectual, than that now under consideration. It must not, however, be forgotten that side by side with Poor Law dispensaries, has grown up, also under the sanction of the Metropolitan Poor Act, a system ... which by encouraging and affording special facilities for the grant of indoor relief to sick paupers, must, if the policy of the Act be unflinchingly carried out, eventually tend ... to the gradual abolition of out-relief to the sick, other than those incapable of removal from their homes. If this be so, Poor Law dispensaries ... must ultimately be found to have had for the most part a merely temporary place in the system of relief in London.... The character of permanence should not be hastily affixed to the system which they represent" (Mr. Longley's Report on Indoor Relief in the Metropolis, in Fourth Annual Report, 1874-5, pp. 41-42). In spite of this criticism, the Central Authority continued to sanction Poor Law dispensaries. Elaborate institutions on the London plan were established in other unions under the general powers of the Act of 1834; _see_, for instance, the Special Order of 9th June 1873, to Portsea Island Union; those of 4th March and 28th August 1880, to Birmingham; those of 30th November 1885, and 9th January 1895, to Plymouth.
[664] Fourth Annual Report, 1874-5, p. xxi.
It is, however, fair to say that this policy of restricting outdoor medical relief was not expressed in any alteration of the General Orders, nor, explicitly, in any published minute or circular of the Central Authority itself. In the 1871 Circular, discouraging outdoor relief generally, it is, for instance, merely suggested that all paupers receiving relief on account of temporary sickness--among whom there were at that date apparently some 119,000 sick persons[665]--should be visited at least fortnightly by the relieving officer.[666] The Central Authority clung to the general disqualification of paupers, even those in receipt of medical relief only, though the Parliamentary Secretary had to admit that: "No doubt the Legislature had made an exception in the cases of vaccination and of education, and it might be that the exception should be extended to infectious diseases."[667] But when it was pressed to impose a limit of one month to each grant of outdoor relief, the request was, on the cautious advice of the permanent advisers, definitely refused, lest hardship should be caused in cases of sickness; though it was said that the guardians themselves might put such a limit, "where such ... may properly be imposed."[668]
[665] _See_ the statistics in Twenty-second Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1869-70, p. xxiv.
[666] Circular of 2nd December 1871; in First Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1871-2, p. 67.
[667] Mr. Salt, as Secretary of the Local Government Board, on Disqualification by Medical Relief Bill, _Hansard_, 11th December 1878, vol. 243, p. 630. In 1876 the disqualification had been explicitly re-enacted in the Divided Parishes and Poor Law Amendment Act (39 & 40 Vic. c. 61, sec. 14), promoted by the Central Authority itself, whose Parliamentary representatives continued for years to resist all proposals for its abolition or attenuation. In 1883 it was incidentally undermined by maintenance and treatment in the infectious diseases hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board being declared not to be parochial relief (Diseases Prevention Act 1883, 46 & 47 Vic. c. 35). Not until 1885 did the Central Authority consent to its abolition, as regards persons in receipt of medical relief only, in the Medical Relief Disqualification Act 1885 (48 & 49 Vic. c. 46). Even then the "stigma of pauperism" was preserved, by omitting to repeal sec. 14 of the 1876 Act above cited, so that persons in receipt of medical relief only are still nominally disqualified from voting at an election of a Poor Law guardian, "or in the election to an office under the provisions of any statute."
[668] Local Government Board to Chairman of Central Poor Law Conference, 12th May 1877; in Seventh Annual Report, 1877-8, p. 55.
The Central Authority was willing to consider any proposal to amend the law, so as to allow of the compulsory removal to the workhouse of sick persons who had no proper lodging accommodation.[669] But even to a person who had refused to enter the workhouse, the guardians were not to deny outdoor medical relief if sick,[670] and in no case were the sick to be removed from their homes unless certified by the medical officer as physically able to endure the journey.[671] There was thus, even between 1871 and 1885, no explicit reversal, on grounds of Poor Law principle, of the old policy which, it will be remembered, had not been condemned by the 1834 Report of outdoor relief to the sick. If a "destitute young husband or wife were sick," Mr. Sclater-Booth, speaking as President of the Local Government Board, told the House of Commons in 1876, "they would not be taken into the workhouse, but would receive outdoor relief."[672] Two years later the Central Authority actually declared itself in favour of supplying to the sick poor who were under domiciliary treatment, not only medical attendance and maintenance, but also skilled professional nursing. There was, it said in reply to influential medical pressure, "nothing to prevent the guardians supplying such assistance," and the Central Authority was even "desirous of encouraging this arrangement as much as possible," though the insufficient supply of qualified nurses was likely to "render impracticable for some time to come any general application of the system of paid nurses in the treatment of the poor at their own homes."[673]
[669] _Ibid._ p. 54.
[670] Local Government Board decision, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 11th June 1904, p. 635.
[671] Circular of 23rd May 1879, in Ninth Annual Report, 1879-80, p. 92.
[672] _Hansard_, 13th June 1876, vol. 229, p. 1780 (in Committee on Poor Law Amendment Bill).
[673] Local Government Board to Dr. Mortimer Glanville (_Lancet_ Memorial on Poor Law Medical Relief Reform), 12th November 1878; in Eighth Annual Report, 1878-9, pp. 91-2. In spite of this official answer, we may infer a certain internal conflict of policy with regard to these salaried outdoor Poor Law nurses. Though the Central Authority expressed itself as "desirous of encouraging" the experiment, we cannot find that it issued the Order, without which no board of guardians could create a new salaried office, for nearly fourteen years. The District Nurses Order, which was merely permissive, and which, therefore, could not have been delayed merely because there were, in 1878, not enough trained nurses to supply every union in the Kingdom, was not issued until 27th January 1892 (Twenty-second Annual Report, 1892-3, pp. 12-13). We cannot find that any "paid nurses in the treatment of the poor at their own homes" were sanctioned before that date. Moreover, even then, it is difficult to feel sure that the Central Authority was still, to use its words of 1878, "desirous of encouraging this arrangement as much as possible." In sending the Order to boards of guardians, it accompanied it by a circular, which can scarcely be deemed encouraging. It was of opinion that "it can only be under exceptional circumstances that a sick pauper, whose illness is of such a character as to require that the services of a nurse should be provided by the guardians, can, with propriety, be relieved at home. At the same time it appears ... that where circumstances render it desirable the nurses employed in such attendance should be duly appointed officers of the guardians, having recognised qualifications for the position, and being subject in the performance of their duties to the control of the guardians, and the Board have consequently decided to empower boards of guardians to appoint such officers" (Circular of 1st February 1892; in Twenty-second Annual Report, 1892-3, p. 9). Fifteen more years have elapsed; but we do not gather that the experiment, which the Central Authority in 1878 was desirous of encouraging, has been very strenuously pressed by the inspectors, or the power made publicly known. The result is that we cannot find that it has yet taken shape even to the extent of as many as a dozen salaried Poor Law nurses for the outdoor sick from one end of the Kingdom to the other.
(ii.) _Institutional Treatment_
Meanwhile, however, the substitution of indoor for outdoor relief in the case of the sick[674] was being supported on grounds, not of Poor Law principle, but of medical efficiency. The transformation of the workhouses into what the Poor Law inspectors themselves began to call "State hospitals" made more striking than ever the contrast between the light, clean, and airy newly-built infirmary ward, with trained nurses, a resident doctor, complete equipment, and a scientifically determined dietary, on the one hand; and the insanitary and overcrowded hovel or slum tenement, on the other, in which the sick pauper had no other food than was provided by the pittance of outdoor relief, no further nursing than his family could supply, and no better medical attendance than the grudgingly accorded order on the district medical officer could command. Quite irrespective of "Poor Law principles," the case for institutional rather than domiciliary treatment of nearly every sick case became, to the medical experts who now advised the Central Authority, simply overwhelming. "The treatment which in sickness the poor receive in workhouses constitutes," said the Central Authority in 1878, "one of the most valuable forms of medical relief. _With a considerable portion of the population, indeed, it is the only mode in which, when overtaken by sickness, their medical needs can be adequately met._"[675] This policy led not only to an incessant pressure on boards of guardians to provide the "State hospitals" which had, from 1865 onwards, been expected from the guardians of all populous unions,[676] but also to a positive encouragement of sick persons, whether or not actually destitute in the technical sense of the term, to take advantage of them. We see this first with regard to infectious diseases. The hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, maintained out of the Poor Rate exclusively for paupers, and technically only workhouses like any others, soon came to be used, free of charge, by small-pox and fever patients who were not paupers.[677] It became the official policy, well understood by the Central Authority, to get removed to these Poor Law institutions every patient, whether destitute or not, who could not be adequately isolated at home.[678] Already in 1875 the Central Authority expressly authorised the medical superintendent to admit without an order any small-pox or fever patient presenting himself, if refusal to admit might involve danger,[679] and in 1887 it expressly permitted even non-urgent cases to be admitted on the certificate of any medical practitioner.[680] Nevertheless, in 1877 the Central Authority was still taking the line that "the hospitals ... of ... the Metropolitan Asylums Board are essentially intended to meet the requirements of the destitute class, and that the admission ... of persons not in need of poor relief is altogether exceptional."[681] Two years later, however, by a statute promoted by the Central Authority itself, the Metropolitan Asylums Board were expressly empowered to receive non-pauper patients, though only under contracts with the local public health authorities, by which they were to be paid for.[682] We cannot discover which vestries and district boards, if any, entered into such contracts. Not until 1883, when these fever and small-pox hospitals had been a dozen years in use by non-paupers, was the position temporarily legalised by the Diseases Prevention Act of 1883[683]--a measure also carried by the Central Authority itself--which, whilst leaving these hospitals as Poor Law institutions, administered by a Poor Law authority, and kept up out of the poor rate, declared that admission, treatment, and maintenance therein should--whether the patients were or were not otherwise paupers--not be deemed parochial relief, or carry with it any disqualification whatever.[684] Since that day we have the remarkable spectacle of the Poor Law Authorities, Central and Local, annually congratulating themselves on the fact that, year after year, they were managing to attract into these expensive Poor Law institutions, for gratuitous maintenance and treatment, a larger and larger percentage of the total number of cases notified.[685]
[674] "The sick" were held to include not only acute cases, but also cases of "chronic disease requiring regular medical treatment and trained nursing" (and also venereal and skin diseases, including the itch). (Local Government Board to Poplar Union, October 1871; MS. Minutes, Poplar Board of Guardians, 6th October 1871).
[675] Local Government Board to Dr. Mortimer Glanville (_Lancet_ Memorial on Poor Law Medical Relief Reform), 12th November 1878; in Eighth Annual Report, 1878-9, p. 91.
[676] The more old-fashioned guardians failed to keep pace with the Central Authority in its ignoring of the principle of "less eligibility" with regard to the sick; _see_, for instance, _The New Pauper Infirmaries and Casual Wards_, by a Lambeth Guardian, 1875, in which the elaborate hospital requirements are objected to as being far too good for paupers. Where the guardians persisted in refusing to provide the elaborate and expensive new infirmary accommodation considered necessary, the Central Authority at last issued a peremptory Order requiring them to submit plans within a month, under penalty of having plans "prepared at the expense of the union" and of being deprived of "the benefit of participation in the Common Poor Fund" (Local Government Board to St. Olave's Union, June 1873; see _Local Government Chronicle_, 5th July 1873, p. 379).
[677] For unions out of London we have to note an extraordinary provision of 1879, proposed by the Central Authority itself. Boards of guardians in rural districts were empowered to transfer any of their buildings (into which only destitute persons could legally be received) from themselves as Poor Law authorities to themselves as public health authorities (in which case the buildings became available, without the stigma of pauperism, for all classes of the population) (Poor Law Act 1879 (42 & 43 Vic. c. 54, sec. 14)). We cannot discover in which cases, if any, this provision was acted upon, and the necessary confirmatory Order issued by the Central Authority; or what difference it made to the buildings.
[678] This was, in effect, to hold that inability to secure isolation, when isolation was required, amounted to destitution, so far as this kind of medical relief was concerned, just as a man requiring an expensive surgical operation was legally within the definition of destitute for the purpose of the operation if he could not pay the market price of it, even if he had ample food, clothing, and shelter. We cannot discover, however, that this explanation was actually given in an official document. Under it, not merely "a considerable portion of the population," but practically five-sixths of it would, in cases of infectious disease, have to be deemed destitute.
[679] Order of 10th February 1875, art. 4.
[680] Circular of 8th July 1887, in Seventeenth Annual Report, 1887-8, p. 9.
[681] Circular of 2nd January 1877, in Sixth Annual Report, 1876-7, p. 33.
[682] Poor Law Act 1879 (42 & 43 Vic. c. 54, sec. 15).
[683] 46 & 47 Vic. c. 35.
[684] The Central Authority was apparently loth to accept the situation. The statute was deliberately made only a temporary one, expiring in a year. But it was annually renewed, and in 1891 the provision was made permanent in the Public Health (London) Act of that year. Meanwhile the Poor Law Act 1889 (52 & 53 Vic. c. 56, sec. 3), had expressly authorised the admission of non-paupers, entitling the guardians to recover the cost from the patients if the guardians chose; but making their expenses, in default of such recoupment, chargeable (as were the expenses of the pauper patients) on the Common Poor Fund. We cannot discover that any attempt was made to recover the cost from the patients; and in 1891 the very idea was abandoned.
[685] Annual Reports of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, 1889-1906. In 1888, in anticipation of the necessary amendment of the law, the Central Authority authorised the admission of diphtheria cases (Local Government Board to Metropolitan Asylums Board, October 1888; _Local Government Chronicle_, 27th October 1888, p. 986; Poor Law Act 1889 (52 & 53 Vic. c. 56, sec. 3); Order of 21st October 1889, in Nineteenth Annual Report, 1889-90, p. 96). The boards of guardians outside the Metropolis failed, we believe everywhere, to respond to the invitations of the Central Authority to provide similar accommodation for infectious diseases. In 1876 the inspector was doing his utmost, by special Order of the Central Authority, to induce the Manchester, Salford, Chorlton, and Prestwich Boards of Guardians to unite in establishing out of the poor rates a hospital for infectious diseases, which should admit non-paupers on payment (MS. Minutes, Manchester Board of Guardians, 17th February 1876).
A similar enlargement of the sphere of the Poor Law institution has, of late years, been going on in other than infectious cases. "The poorer classes generally," to use Mr. Goschen's words, "as distinguished from actual paupers," came more and more to appreciate the practical distinction between the workhouse and the Poor Law infirmary; and, especially in the Metropolis and the large towns, the latter became more and more freely used as a general hospital.[686] This tendency was facilitated in London by the operation of the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund established by the Central Authority itself, which, from 1870 onward, bore the bulk of the cost of maintenance of the Poor Law infirmaries, as of the hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board.[687] The Central Authority saw with approval the increasing attractiveness of these institutions, not only in London but throughout the country. In an official memorandum communicated to all boards of guardians in 1892, it observed that: "The sick poor can usually be better tended and nursed by skilled nurses in well-equipped sick wards than in their own homes; and the regularity, neatness, and order of the wards _tend to diminish the repugnance to entering the workhouse_, which is often evinced by the sick poor of the better class when reduced to want by failing health."[688] It did not refuse to permit them to be made use of by paying patients, where--as is usually the case in rural districts--no "non-pauper institution" was available. "If," writes the Central Authority in 1902, there is "a sick person who is in receipt of an allowance from a benefit club or similar society," and who "is unable to obtain in a non-pauper institution such treatment as the illness from which he suffers requires," the Central Authority will "offer no objection to his admission to the workhouse infirmary."[689]
[686] In 1889, for instance, the Central Authority provided that, in cases of sudden or urgent necessity, the medical superintendent or his assistant should admit patients on his own responsibility, without order from the relieving officer (Special Order to Mile End Old Town, 10th October 1889).
[687] Under the Metropolitan Poor Amendment Act 1870, the cost of the maintenance of adult paupers in workhouses and sick asylums, to the extent of 5d. per head per day, was thrown on the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund. To two-thirds of the Metropolitan unions, including all the poorer ones, this operated as a bribe in favour of indoor (or infirmary) treatment as against domiciliary or dispensary treatment. Mr. Longley wished to go much further. In order practically to compel all the Metropolitan boards of guardians to provide these elaborate and expensive hospitals, he recommended that the whole cost of indoor maintenance of the sick, when in infirmaries separated in position and administration from the ordinary workhouses, should be made a charge on the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund (Mr. Longley's Report on Indoor Relief in the Metropolis, in Fourth Annual Report, 1874-5, p. 54).
[688] Memorandum on Nursing in Workhouse Sick Wards, April 1892; in Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, p. 114.
[689] Decision of Local Government Board in _Local Government Chronicle_, 18th October 1902, p. 1051.
To those boards of guardians who clung to the policy of "deterring" the sick poor from obtaining medical relief--which, as we have shown, Mr. Gathorne Hardy had, on behalf of the Central Authority, in 1867 expressly repudiated[690]--all this official encouragement to enter Poor Law institutions seemed revolutionary. The fact that the sick poor came more and more to draw a distinction between the workhouse on the one hand, and the Poor Law infirmary or isolation hospital on the other, appeared seriously objectionable. When it was noticed that the Central Authority officially styled the separate institution for the sick "an asylum for the sick poor,"[691] or "the hospital," or simply the "infirmary,"[692] the Manchester guardians revolted, and definitely instructed their medical and relieving officers "to avoid using the word 'hospital' or 'infirmary,' and simply to use the word 'workhouse.'"[693] Other boards, we believe, insisted--although "the infirmary" was an entirely distinct institution--that it should be entered only through the workhouse itself. Against this lingering objection on grounds of Poor Law policy to get the sick cured in the most efficient way, we see the inspectorate in the later years more and more explicitly protesting. "I wish it were possible," said Mr. Preston-Thomas in 1899, "to get rid of the name of workhouse (which, by the way, has become singularly inappropriate), for I believe that it is to the associations of the name rather than to the institution itself that prejudice attaches. The disinclination of the independent poor to enter the hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, which was considerable at first, has now practically vanished, and I do not see why there should not be the same change of feeling with regard to Poor Law infirmaries in the country."[694]
[690] _Hansard_, 8th February 1867, vol. 185, p. 163; _see_ ante, pp. 120-21.
[691] Metropolitan Poor Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vic. c. 6); Special Order to Central London Sick Asylum District, 13th May 1873.
[692] Special Order to Lambeth, 25th August 1873.
[693] MS. Minutes, Manchester Board of Guardians, 14th August 1879. Some of the inspectors seem to have shared this objection. As late as 1901 we find one reporting that "the admission into our workhouse infirmaries of persons above the pauper class, and not destitute, is, I fear, increasing" (Mr. J. W. Preston's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 97).
[694] Mr. Preston-Thomas's Report, in Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 1898-9, p. 135.
In the same spirit we see the Central Authority in these three decades persistently pressing Boards of Guardians to build new workhouse infirmaries.[695] The report becomes current in the Poor Law world that Local Government Board officers, in interviews, went so far as to say that a certain board of guardians was morally guilty of manslaughter in refusing to embark on extensive new building operations. The official architect's criticisms on the Poor Law infirmary plans submitted to him are all on the lines of making these into up-to-date general hospitals. The proposals sanctioned by the Central Authority go up to a capital outlay of £350 per bed. The Central Authority even sanctions special hospitals established by the guardians at the expense of the poor rate, for particular classes of patients, such as the "West Derby, Liverpool and Toxteth Park Hospital, ... for the reception of persons suffering from tuberculosis," many of whom are so little destitute that they pay the cost of their treatment and maintenance;[696] or, as at Croydon, Kingston, and Richmond, "for the reception of epileptic and feeble-minded persons," who cannot be certified as of unsound mind.[697] Persons in receipt of medical relief only are no longer disqualified as paupers from being registered as Parliamentary and Municipal electors, and it has even been held that admission to a Poor Law hospital, sick asylum, or infirmary because of ill-health, and for the purpose of being medically treated, amounts to medical relief only, even though it incidentally involves also maintenance at the expense of the poor rate.[698] By 1903 we have the Central Authority laying it down in general terms, "that it is the guardians' duty to provide for their sick poor, and no sanction ... is necessary to sending such cases to institutions for curative treatment ... and ... paying reasonable expenses involved in so doing."[699] The Central Authority seems, indeed, to exhaust official ingenuity in securing the best possible treatment and also the comfort of the patients in the sick wards.[700] Any reasonable fee may be paid for calling in consultants whenever the medical officer thinks it "necessary or desirable," without any special sanction being requisite.[701] We need not recite the constant struggle to get more nurses and better. As early as 1879 a president could (perhaps with some ministerial optimism) declare that: "in the new infirmaries I have succeeded in abolishing pauper help almost entirely."[702]
[695] "the curtailment of the stage of convalescence," urged the medical inspector in 1875, on a hesitating board of guardians, "alone rapidly covers any additional outlay that may have been incurred in structural arrangements, whilst the increased chances of recovery to the sick and afflicted are not to be measured by any mere money standard" (Dr. Mouat, medical inspector of Local Government Board, in Report on Infirmary of Newcastle Union; MS. archives, Newcastle Board of Guardians, 26th November 1875). Already by 1891 the Central Authority is able to inform Parliament that the number of "sick beds" provided in Poor Law Institutions throughout the country--irrespective of the mere infirm aged--is no less than 68,420 (House of Commons, No. 365 of 1891; Twenty-first Annual Report, 1891-2, p. lxxxvi). In 1896 there were 58,551 persons occupying the workhouse wards for the sick, of whom 19,287 were merely aged and infirm, whilst there were in attendance 1961 trained nurses, 1384 paid but untrained nurses (probationers), and 3443 pauper helpers, of whom 1374 were convalescents (Twenty-sixth Annual Report, 1896-7, p. lxvi; House of Commons, No. 371 of 1896).
[696] Special Orders to West Derby, Liverpool and Toxteth Park, 5th April 1900 and 25th January 1901. In 1888 two other Boards of Guardians were even urged and authorised to combine in the taking over and maintenance of a specialised hospital for a particular class of diseases, and to conduct it as a Poor Law institution with the aid of a small annual subsidy from national funds, on the understanding that all local cases were taken. There was to be no sort of "deterrent" influence. Patients, suffering from these diseases, were to be admitted on the authority of the medical superintendent of the hospital, without there being necessarily any order from the relieving officer; and without any express restriction to the destitute. The well-understood object of this Poor Law institution was, in fact, positively to encourage all persons suffering from the diseases in question to come in and be cured. There was to be no obvious sign that it was a Poor Law institution. It was especially ordered that it should be styled "The Aldershot Lock Hospital" (Special Orders to Farnham and Hartley Wintney Unions, 19th September 1888 and 16th November 1894). This went on for seventeen years, and was given up in 1905 (_ibid._ 30th December 1905).
[697] Special Order to Croydon, Kingston, and Richmond, of 27th December 1904. We gather that this institution has not been established. A similar one exists at Manchester.
[698] By some Revising Barristers under the Medical Relief Disqualification Removal Act 1885 (48 & 49 Vic. c. 46).
[699] _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1902-3, by W. A. Casson, 1904, p. 7. The Poor Law Act 1879 had, in fact, expressly authorised boards of guardians to subscribe to charitable institutions to which paupers might have access. It was held, for instance, that boards of guardians may, if they choose, send their sane adult epileptics to an epileptic colony, and pay the cost of their maintenance there (_Local Government Chronicle_, 29th October 1904, p. 1123). In 1901, the Central Authority sanctioned the payment of £70 by the Bramley Board of Guardians for a cot in the sanatorium of the Leeds Association for the Cure of Tuberculosis (Local Government Board to Bramley Union, February 1901, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 23rd February 1901, p. 184).
[700] In 1903 it sanctioned the expenditure involved in the setting up of Röntgen Ray apparatus in a Poor Law infirmary (_Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1902-3, by W. A. Casson, 1904, p. 10).
[701] _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1903-4, by W. A. Casson, 1905, p. 39.
[702] _Hansard_, 24th July 1879, vol. 248, p. 1173.
The guardians are reminded that the epileptics are especially to be incessantly accompanied by trained nurses, lest they should be suffocated in their fits.[703] The sick men in the workhouse may be allowed tobacco and snuff, the sick women tea, in addition to that prescribed in the dietary table.[704] The doctor is expressly reminded that it is his duty to "order such food as he may consider requisite."[705] When a complaint was made that beer was supplied in a Norfolk workhouse, the Central Authority refused to interfere with a "beer allowance" to sick paupers, given and renewed from week to week by direction of the medical officer.[706] The guardians are even reminded of the importance of providing illustrated books and newspapers for the sick.[707]
[703] Local Government Board decision, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 1st November 1902, p. 1102.
[704] General Order of 8th March 1894, in Twenty-fourth Annual Report, 1894-5, pp. xcix, 4-5.
[705] Circular of 29th January 1895, in Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, p. iii.
[706] Mr. Long in House of Commons (23rd June 1904; _Hansard_, vol. 136, p. 971).
[707] Circular of 23rd January 1891; Twentieth Annual Report, 1890-1, p. xc; Report of Royal Commission on Aged Poor, 1895, vol. iii. p. 967, (Cd. 7684 II).
Meanwhile the standard of equipment, of resident medical attendance, and especially of trained nursing[708] required by the Central Authority in the Poor Law institutions is constantly rising, in correspondence with the progress of hospital science. We see all this reflected in the advice and criticisms pressed by the inspectorate on the boards of guardians. "The workhouses of a past and bygone age," says Mr. Hervey in 1903, "are no longer refuges for able-bodied, but are becoming every day more of the nature of State hospitals for the aged, sick, and infirm. _As such, they should be furnished with the very best nursing procurable._"[709]
[708] _See_ the references to nursing in Circulars of 29th January 1895 and 7th August 1897; and the General Order (Nursing of the Sick in Workhouses) 6th August 1897; Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, pp. 109-110; Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 1897-8, pp. 27-31.
[709] Mr. Hervey's Report, in Thirty-second Annual Report, 1902-3, p. 69. The total cost of Poor Law medical relief in 1904-5 was £518,994 indoor (to which might be added £640,833 for what are now called the "public health purposes" of the greatest of all Poor Law authorities, the Metropolitan Asylums Board); and £268,537 outdoor (Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, pp. 251, 589, 590). This aggregate total of £787,531 (excluding the fever hospitals of the Metropolitan Asylums Board) omits the maintenance of the sick themselves, but includes, however, some items not previously included. For comparative purposes we must take the figure for 1903-4 (£423,554), which includes only doctors' salaries and drugs. This may be compared with the corresponding figure for 1881 of £310,456; for 1871, of £290,249; and for 1840 of £151,781 (Twenty-second Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1869-70, p. 227; Eleventh Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1881-2, p. 237).
(iii.) _The Municipal Medical Service_
It may be that it is on the Public Health side, which was in 1871 added to the Poor Law work of the Central Authority, that we may trace the influence of the suggestion that was under discussion at the Poor Law Board under Mr. Goschen's presidency, just prior to its merging in the Local Government Board. The idea of "free medicine to the poorer classes generally, as distinguished from actual paupers, and perfect accessibility to medical advice at all times under thorough organisation"--which the new permanent secretary, Sir John Lambert, may have brought back from his official visit to Ireland--finds a certain expression in the Public Health Act of 1872, re-enacted with additions in 1875, which created "one local authority for all public health purposes in every place, so that no area should be without such an authority, or have more than one." In the rural districts the board of guardians became this authority. As such they came under a series of responsibilities based upon ideas diametrically opposed to those of the Poor Law. Instead of confining their action to actual applicants for help, they had to search out cases of nuisance or dangerous disease. Instead of restricting their administration to those who were willing and anxious for it, they were charged with compelling to be done all that was required. Instead of being limited in purview to a small class specially stigmatised as paupers, the guardians had to consider the whole population as needing their attention without distinction of class or subjection to stigma. They were expressly authorised, not merely to repress nuisances, but to provide hospitals "for the use of the inhabitants," without any limitation to infectious or any other diseases.[710] They were even empowered, with the consent of the Central Authority, to "provide or contract with any person to provide a temporary supply of medicine and medical assistance for the poorer inhabitants of their district."[711] The Central Authority eagerly pressed on the local authorities the policy of the new Act.[712] We see the Poor Law inspectors--who were "in possession of the views of the (Local Government) Board on the subject"--explaining to boards of guardians in unions having rural districts their new duties; the future work of their new Public Health staff of medical officer of health and sanitary inspectors; and their responsibility for maintaining and improving the health, not of paupers only, but of the whole community.[713] We are not here concerned with the progress of public health administration, in which the boards of guardians cannot be said to have been apt or willing disciples. It is not to the boards of guardians, in 1907 still the sanitary authorities in non-urban districts, that we owe the elaborate medical organisation of an up-to-date Public Health Department, with its peripatetic health visitors and diagnosing doctors, its milk depots and campaign against infantile mortality, its gratuitous supply of anti-toxins and diarrhoea medicine, its gratuitous hospitals and sanatoria no longer confined to small-pox and fever. We need only notice here the gradual appreciation, by the Central Authority and the Poor Law inspectors, of the intimate connection between shortcomings in the public health service and an excess of pauperism. Even from the narrowest standpoint of Poor Law principles, the causal connection between disease and pauperism could no longer be ignored. "The effect of bad house accommodation on the health of the poor," writes Mr. Bagenal in 1902, "has often been demonstrated by experts in public health. Not only are serious illnesses more frequent, but damp and draughty dwellings lower vitality to such an extent that the bodily vigour and activity, as well as the spirits, are affected, and the system becomes unable to withstand actual disease. Families are often pauperised on account of sickness produced by living in unhealthy conditions. Labourers also often become permanently disabled, and fall upon the rates, owing to premature old age brought on by insanitary houses. To prevent sickness and to prolong the working term of a labourer's life must be a gain to the ratepayers, as well as to all classes of the community."[714] To take only one specific instance, in the Redruth Union the reason for a high average of pauperism in 1906 was found in the large amount of destitution produced by "miner's phthisis," and the great number of widows and orphans which it caused, "the total number of persons pauperised owing to this special cause being ... 333," besides other cases of infirmity of the miners themselves. "A substantial proportion of the excessive pauperism in the Redruth Union is thus accounted for."[715]
[710] Sec. 131 of Public Health Act 1875 (38 & 39 Vic. c. 55).
[711] Sec. 133 of _ibid._ This had been already included in the Sanitary Act of 1868 (31 & 32 Vic. c. 115, sec. 10).
[712] Circular of 17th August and 12th November 1872, in Second Annual Report, 1872-3, pp. 19-20, 41-52.
[713] _See_, _e.g._ the letters of Mr. Hedley, in September 1872, in MS. archives of Newcastle Board of Guardians.
[714] Mr. Bagenal's Report, in Thirty-first Annual Report, 1901-2, p. 139.
[715] Mr. Preston-Thomas's Report, in Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, pp. 471-2.
_F._--PERSONS OF UNSOUND MIND
It does not seem necessary to trace the slight changes in the law relating to pauper lunatics, or in the orders and circulars of the Central Authority. There appears to have been no alteration in the relation of the Central Authority to the Lunacy Commissioners, practically no steps being taken to initiate policy except upon the suggestion of the latter, whose standard of accommodation and treatment continues steadily to rise for pauper as for non-pauper lunatics.
The only point of interest is the continuance, virtually unchanged, of the three methods of treatment, viz. maintenance in the workhouse, treatment in a lunatic asylum, or grant of outdoor relief.
The number of persons of unsound mind in the workhouse continued practically undiminished, without any steps being taken to prevent their retention among the aged, the sick, and the children, who came more and more to make up the workhouse population.[716] There were, in fact, three classes of cases in which a lunatic might be detained in a workhouse. Firstly, there is the old provision, under which "the visitors of any asylum may, with the consent of the Local Government Board and the Commissioners, and subject to such regulations as they respectively prescribe, make arrangements with the guardians of any union for the reception into the workhouse of any chronic lunatics, not being dangerous, who are in the asylum, and have been selected and certified by the manager of the asylum as proper to be removed to the workhouse."[717] Secondly, "where a pauper lunatic is discharged from an institution for lunatics, and the medical officer of the institution is of opinion that the lunatic has not recovered, and is a proper person to be kept in a workhouse as a lunatic, the medical officer shall certify such opinion, and the lunatic may thereupon be received and detained against his will in a workhouse without further order, if the medical officer of the workhouse certifies in writing that the accommodation in the workhouse is sufficient."[718] Thirdly, if it is necessary for the welfare of a lunatic, or for the public safety, that he should immediately be placed under care and control, pending regular proceedings for his removal, he may be taken to a workhouse (if there is proper accommodation therein) by a constable, relieving officer, or overseer, and may be detained there for three days, during which time the proceedings are to be taken; and in any case in which a summary reception order has been or might be made, he may be further detained on a justice's order till he can be removed, provided that the period does not exceed fourteen days.[719] Moreover, any other lunatic might be "allowed to remain in a workhouse as a lunatic" if "the medical officer of the workhouse certifies in writing: (_a_) that such a person is a lunatic, with the grounds for the opinion; and (_b_) that he is a proper person to be allowed to remain in a workhouse as a lunatic; and (_c_) that the accommodation in the workhouse is sufficient for his proper care and treatment, separate from the inmates of the workhouse not lunatics, unless the medical officer certifies that the lunatic's condition is such that it is not necessary for the convenience of the lunatic or of the other inmates that he should be kept separate." Such a certificate signed by the medical officer is sufficient authority for detaining the lunatic in a workhouse for fourteen days, but no longer, unless within that time a justice signs an order for his detention. Failing such a certificate, or, after fourteen days, such an order, or if at any time the lunatic ceases to be "a proper person to be allowed to remain in a workhouse," he becomes "a proper person to be sent to an asylum," and proceedings are to be taken accordingly.[720]
[716] It seems to have been entirely as an exception that the Rochdale Guardians fitted up what was practically a lunatic asylum in their workhouse, adequately equipped, staffed, and isolated; and took in a number of Lancashire chronic lunatics (Special Order of 13th April 1893; Twenty-third Annual Report, 1893-4, p. xcii).
[717] Lunacy Act, 1890, 53 Vic. c. 5, sec. 26.
[718] _Ibid._ sec. 25; cf. Lunacy Act 1889, 52 & 53 Vic. c. 41, sec. 22.
[719] Lunacy Act 1890, secs. 20, 21; cf. Lunacy Act 1885, 48 & 49 Vic. c. 52, secs. 2 and 3.
[720] _Ibid._ sec. 24.
Meanwhile the Central Authority continued to permit the grant of outdoor relief in cases of lunacy; and about 5000 were always so maintained.
Regulations for the boarding-out of pauper lunatics first appear in the Act of 1889. "Where application is made to the committee of visitors of an asylum by any relative or friend of a pauper lunatic confined therein that he may be delivered over to the custody of such relative or friend, the committee may, upon being satisfied that the application has been approved by the guardians of the union to which the lunatic is chargeable, and, in case the proposed residence is outside the limits of the said union, then also by a justice having jurisdiction in the place where the relative or friend resides, and that the lunatic will be properly taken care of, order the lunatic to be delivered over accordingly." The authority liable for such a lunatic's maintenance is to pay an allowance for his support to the person who undertakes his care; the medical officer of the district is to visit him and report to the visiting committee every quarter, and two visitors may at any time order the lunatic to be removed to the asylum.[721] Any two Commissioners have also the right to visit any pauper lunatic or alleged lunatic not in an institution for lunatics or in a workhouse, and call in a medical practitioner; if the latter signs a certificate, and they think fit, the Lord Chancellor may direct that the lunatic be received into an institution.[722]
[721] Lunacy Act 1889, sec. 40.
[722] _Ibid._ sec. 42.
For the paupers of unsound mind in the Metropolis there was even a fourth alternative, namely, the "district asylums" of the Metropolitan Asylum Board. On the opening of the Darenth Asylum, the Central Authority quoted, without disapproval, the following remarks of the Lunacy Commissioners: "The withdrawal, for proper care, of helpless children of this kind [idiots] from the households of many of the industrious and deserving poor is a frequent means of _warding off pauperism in the parents_."[723] We do not find, however, any more explicit statement on this point. What the Central Authority continued to press on the Boards of Guardians was, not so much the importance of relieving the struggling poor from the burden of their insane or idiotic dependants, nor yet the freeing of the workhouses from the presence of persons of unsound mind; but rather of appropriate discrimination. "It is of great importance not merely to exclude from the [district] asylums those who, by reason of violence or irritability, are proper subjects for the county asylum, but also those who, from old age or disease, are unfit for the journey to the asylum, or who, from the slight degree to which their mind is affected, might more properly remain in the workhouse."[724] "The removal of helpless, bedridden persons, whose mental weakness is, in many cases, the result of old age, to asylums situated a considerable distance from the Metropolis, is calculated, on the one hand, to be injurious to the persons thus removed, and, on the other, to occupy the district asylums with a different class of persons from that for which they were constructed."[725] Imbecile children are to be kept in the workhouse till they are five years old, and may then be sent to the asylum at Darenth.[726] Outside the Metropolis there is no specialised Poor Law provision for idiots, who, if not received into the county asylum, must either be placed in non-Poor-Law institutions at considerable expense, or detained in the workhouse. In 1885 the Central Authority even suggested that harmless and aged lunatics had, on grounds of economy, better be retained in the workhouse, rather than removed to an asylum.[727] We hear incidentally of a Special Order in 1900 under which certain chronic lunatics were actually transferred from the Suffolk County Asylum to the workhouse of the Mildenhall Union.[728] As late as 1905 we find the Central Authority expressing regret that so many cases of senile imbecility were removed from the workhouses to asylums.[729]
[723] Eighth Annual Report, 1878-9, p. xli.
[724] First Annual Report, 1871-2, p. xxix.
[725] Circular Letter, "Metropolitan Asylums for Imbeciles," 12th February 1875, in Fifth Annual Report, 1875-6, p. 3.
[726] Circular Letter, "Age of Children sent to Imbecile Asylums," 24th July 1882, in Twelfth Annual Report, 1882-3, p. 17.
[727] Local Government Board to West Ham, January 1885; _Local Government Chronicle_, 24th January 1885, p. 77.
[728] Special Order of 21st March 1900 (apparently not published); referred to in Thirtieth Annual Report 1900-1, p. ci.
[729] Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, p. clxxi.
Under this policy the number of paupers of unsound mind receiving outdoor relief diminished very slightly, being 4736 on 1st January 1906; those in the asylums of the Metropolitan Asylums Board and in county and borough lunatic asylums rose to no fewer than 92,409; whilst those in workhouses nevertheless did not fall off from the total of thirty-five years previously, being, in fact, on 1st January 1906, 11,484, or an average of nineteen in each workhouse.[730]
[730] _Ibid._ p. clxx.
Towards the latter part of the time we begin to find the inspectors, somewhat in disaccord with the suggestions of the Central Authority itself, protesting against the presence in the workhouses even of the chronic lunatic, the harmless idiot, or the senile imbecile, on the new ground that their presence caused annoyance to the sane inmates--annoyance which had, for seventy years, been apparently either unnoticed or not considered. "I am sorry to say," reported Mr. Preston-Thomas in 1901, "that in all but six of the workhouses in my district imbeciles mix freely with the other workhouse inmates. Many of them are mischievous, noisy, or physically offensive.
In some instances, even if their bodily ailment is very slight, they sleep in the sick wards in order that they may come under the supervision of the nurses, and they frequently disturb other patients at night. By day they are a source of much irritation and annoyance, and in a small workhouse I have known the lives of a number of old men made seriously uncomfortable by a mischievous idiot for whom no place could be found in an asylum.... I am much afraid," prophetically continued Mr. Preston-Thomas, "that ... the question will be postponed indefinitely, and six or eight years hence the idiots will still be worrying the sane inmates of workhouses.... It is in the country workhouses, sometimes with only a dozen imbeciles or less, divided among the sexes, that the chief difficulty arises.... A good many are often found useful in the laundry and other domestic work of the institution, but I do not think this consideration ought to outweigh what may almost be characterised as the cruelty of requiring sane persons to associate, by day and by night, with gibbering idiots."[731] When the Select Committee on the Bill to establish Cottage Homes for the Aged Poor in 1900 strongly recommended the removal of all imbeciles from workhouses, the Central Authority, observing that the advisability of this step had been repeatedly brought to its notice by guardians and others, declared that the question must be deferred.[732]
[731] Mr. Preston-Thomas's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. 122-3.
[732] Circular of 4th August 1900, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 18.
_G._--DEFECTIVES
For the first twenty years after 1871 there is no alteration of policy to record with regard to defectives. In fact, the Central Authority does not seem to have paid much attention to this class, whether mentally or physically defective, during this period. It enjoined no policy for the treatment of them till 1891. A Circular on "Blind and Deaf and Dumb inmates of Workhouses" then required the inspectors to "continue to give special attention" to children among this class, and urge their removal from the workhouse when desirable. It was held that the guardians might, if they chose, pay the whole of the maintenance of deaf and dumb children sent to appropriate institutions. No limit has been fixed, but in no case has more than £20 a year been sanctioned.[733] Adults also were to be given instruction in reading and writing, if able to profit thereby, and if such instruction could not be provided in the union, they might be sent, under contract, to the workhouse of some other union where teaching might be available, either in the workhouse or in the town. It is also suggested that arrangements might with advantage be made for reading aloud to the aged blind in the workhouse. But it was held to be illegal to pay for the technical instruction of blind workhouse inmates at a non-Poor-Law institution.[734] From 1903 onward, however, we have the almost dramatic extension of the scope of the Education Authority with regard to defective children of all kinds--a change which has already gone far to transfer responsibility for the treatment of the blind, the deaf and dumb, the crippled, the epileptic, and the mentally defective children up to sixteen from the Poor Law to the Education Authorities. The first step was the Act of 1893, which required the local Education Authority to provide education for blind and deaf children; but children sent to any institution from the workhouse, or boarded out by the guardians, were expressly excluded.[735] In 1899 similar provision was made for defective and epileptic children; and the guardians were authorised to arrange with the Education Authority to take over Poor Law cases on payment.[736] Under these Acts provision is more and more being made, especially in London, for the education, treatment, and even (where requisite) maintenance in educational institutions of these children up to sixteen.
[733] _Selections from the Correspondence of the Local Government Board_, vol. i 1880, p. 53; vol. ii. 1883, p. 281; vol. iii. 1888, p. 102.
[734] _Ibid._ vol. iii. 1888, p. 101.
[735] Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act 1893 (56 and 57 Vic. c. 42).
[736] Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act 1899 (62 and 63 Vic. c. 32).
In 1903 a Special Order provided for the transfer, from the Metropolitan workhouses to the special homes of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, of children who, without being certified as of unsound mind, were mentally defective; and for their retention in such homes until twenty-one years of age.[737] We do not find any corresponding provision with regard to the mentally defective children outside the Metropolis; or for the mentally defectives beyond sixteen years of age. In the rural workhouses, at any rate, which make up three-fourths of the whole, it would seem that in 1907, as it was officially reported in 1879, these mentally defectives, together with "the imbeciles, are more or less mixed up with the ordinary inmates of the class to which they belong."[738]
[737] Special Order of 4th March 1903; Thirty-third Annual Report, 1903-4, p. ci.
[738] Mr. Courtenay Boyle's Report, in Eighth Annual Report, 1878-9, p. 120.
In recent years we see the Central Authority willingly sanctioning special provision for individual cases. Thus, special assistance may be given for starting in trade persons handicapped by their infirmities. In one case, the Board sanctioned the purchase of tools for a blind man who had been taught a trade.[739] In another case, "an adult having become incapacitated by reason of accident from again following his usual occupation, the guardians were desirous of paying a premium in consideration of his being taught a trade which the nature of his infirmity would not prevent his carrying on. On the proposal being submitted to the Local Government Board, the Board observed that as the person was too old to be bound as an apprentice, there was no authority for the payment of the premium, but they suggested whether the difficulty might not be overcome by out-relief being granted during the period of learning."[740]
[739] _Local Government Chronicle_, 29th November 1902, p. 1203.
[740] _Ibid._ 6th December 1902, p. 1225.
A third instance is given as follows: "A boy, aged sixteen years, has been a pupil at an institution for the blind, the fees for his board and education having hitherto been paid by the said board [of guardians] under the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act 1893. The boy is desirous of competing for a scholarship of the value of £40 a year from the Institution for the Blind in London; total fees, £60 a year. The guardians wish to contribute £13 a year, the father, who earns on an average £2:2s. a week, being willing to pay the balance of £7, in addition to travelling expenses and outfit. The Board hold that the guardians can, assuming the boy is in need of relief, carry out their proposal under 30 and 31 Vic. c. 106, sec. 21."[741] An interesting feature of this case is the vagueness of the term "in need of relief," instead of "destitution."
[741] _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1902-3, by W. A. Casson, 1904, p. 14.
_H._--THE AGED AND INFIRM
(i.) _Outdoor Relief_
The crusade of the inspectorate of 1871-85, in favour of the "workhouse system" of Poor Law relief, made no exception in favour of aged persons, whether deserving or undeserving, any more than it did in favour of widows with young children or the sick. On the contrary, Mr. Longley assumed, in every paragraph of his Report,[742] that the "workhouse principle" was universally applicable to "the disabled"--the term he used for the aged and infirm--as well as to the able-bodied. A rigid adherence to the policy of "offering the House" would, he argued, lead the poor to provide, or induce their relatives to provide, for old age as well as for sickness and widowhood.[743] Further, Mr. Longley strongly deprecated any deviation in particular cases from what he euphemistically called "the offer of indoor relief." "That which an applicant does not know certainly that he will not get," he forcibly argued, "he readily persuades himself, if he wishes for it, that he will get; and the poor, to whom any inducement is held out to regard application for relief as a sort of gambling speculation, in which, though many fail, some will succeed, will, like other gamblers, reckon upon their own success."[744] For every "hard case" he relied on the springing up in every union of intelligently directed private charity. "It is, in fact, the very existence of charity"--assumed thus to be always at hand whenever required--"which strengthens the hands of the Poor Law administrator in adherence to rule."[745] Yet, with a certain want of logic, he desired this charitable provision to remain "precarious" and "intermittent;" something which it was possible to argue would always be there when a "hard case" occurred, and which, nevertheless, could not be counted upon by the poor themselves. In other words, he seemed to imply that charitable outdoor relief was superior to Poor Law outdoor relief for the very reason that though some applicants for it would succeed, others in like circumstances would fail to get it--thus inducing, one would have thought, exactly the spirit of "gambling speculation" on the part of the poor that he clearly perceived to arise from the adoption by boards of guardians of an intermittent and uncertain relief policy.
[742] Report on the Administration of Outdoor Relief in the Metropolis, in Third Annual Report, 1873-4, pp. 136-209.
[743] "One of the chief defects," he said, "in the present administration of the law in respect of the disabled class, and especially of that large section of it which consists of the aged and infirm ... is its failure to relieve the rates from the burden of the maintenance of paupers whose relatives, whether legally liable or not, are able to contribute to their support. It is, I believe, within the experience of many boards of guardians, that while there are persons who, even when in prosperous circumstances, readily permit their aged relatives to receive out-relief, an offer of indoor relief is frequently found to put pressure upon them to rescue themselves, if not their relatives, from the discredit incident to the residence of the latter in a workhouse" (_Ibid._ p. 188). Another inspector expressly reported that he urged guardians with regard to the aged "to apply the workhouse test _in order to put a pressure on relatives who are not legally liable_" (Mr. Culley's Report in Third Annual Report, 1873-4, p. 76). So again, in 1875, Mr. Longley argued that the "deterrent discipline" of the workhouse was "the keystone of an efficient system of indoor relief," not merely for the able-bodied, but also for the aged ("directly on the able-bodied, and more remotely upon the disabled class of paupers," the term he always used for the aged) (Report on Indoor Relief in the Metropolis, in Fourth Annual Report, 1874-5, p. 47). It may, however, be noted that Mr. Longley never pretended that this was the policy of the Report of 1834, or of the Act of 1834. To him it was "_a further and special development_ ... of the principles of the Poor Law Amendment Act" (_Ibid._ p. 41).
[744] Mr. Longley's Report in Third Annual Report, 1873-4, p. 144.
[745] _Ibid._
How far this policy of offering the House to all aged persons, deserving or undeserving, was assumed by the other inspectors to be the official policy, and how far it was pressed by them, on boards of guardians throughout the country, we have been unable to ascertain. Apart from the approval of Mr. Longley's views implied by the publication of his Reports and the circulation of them among boards of guardians, the Central Authority maintained, between 1871 and 1896, an absolute silence[746] on the question of outdoor relief to the aged.
[746] We ought, perhaps, to mention that, already in January 1895, under Sir Henry Fowler's presidency, we find the Central Authority writing to a board of guardians, to bespeak greater consideration for the aged and infirm, who needed outdoor relief. The Bradford Guardians had been in the habit of requiring their outdoor paupers to come every week to the workhouse to receive their doles. The Central Authority, far from deprecating this outdoor relief, spontaneously pointed out that the system involved very long walks for many infirm people, and suggested that the guardians should institute four local pay stations (Local Government Board to Bradford Union, 8th January 1895; in MS. archives, Bradford Board of Guardians).
All the more surprising to boards of guardians must have been the sudden and unexpected reversal of this policy by the Central Authority between 1896 and 1900. In July 1896, the Central Authority, under the presidency of Mr. Chaplin, issued a Circular to boards of guardians outside the Metropolis, drawing attention to the importance of the relieving officers and medical officers discharging their duties with the greatest particularity. In a concluding paragraph the Central Authority significantly reminds the guardians of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, of which an extract is appended. "We are convinced," run the recommendations thus exceptionally brought to the guardians' notice, "that there is a strong feeling that in the administration of relief there should be greater discrimination between the respectable aged who become destitute and those whose destitution is distinctly the consequence of their own misconduct; and we recommend that boards of guardians, in dealing with applications for relief, should inquire with special care into the antecedents of destitute persons whose physical faculties have failed by reason of age and infirmity; and that _outdoor relief in such cases should be given_ to those who are shown to have been of good character, thrifty according to their opportunities, and generally independent in early life, and who are not living under conditions of health or surrounding circumstances which make it evident that the relief given should be indoor relief."[747] But this is not all. The poor, far from being left uncertain as to the grant of outdoor relief, were to be specially told that they would receive it if only they led deserving lives. "It accordingly appears to us eminently desirable," continue the recommendations, as communicated by the Central Authority to the boards of guardians, "that boards of guardians should adopt rules in accordance with the general principles which we have indicated, by which they may be broadly guided in dealing with individual applications for relief, and _that such rules should be generally made known for the information of the poor of the union, in order that those really in need may not be discouraged from applying_."[748]
[747] Circular of 11th July 1896; in Twenty-sixth Annual Report, 1896-7, pp. 8-9. No mention is made of this Circular in the Annual Report itself.
[748] _Ibid._ p. 9. In September 1896, under Mr. Chaplin's presidency, the Central Authority "saw no objection" to a proposal of the Poplar Guardians to "board out" an aged married couple in a country cottage at 12s. a week, and added that its sanction was not required, if the case fell within "exception 2 to art. 4" of the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order. It was simply "non-resident relief." But the Central Authority declared that it was impossible for such relief to be made chargeable on the Metropolitan Common Poor Fund, as "boarding-out" was outdoor relief (Local Government Board to Poplar Union, 25th September 1896; MS. archives, Poplar Board of Guardians). The expenses of "boarded-out" children had been placed upon the fund by statute, the Metropolitan Poor Amendment Act 1869.
How far this reversion to the policy contemplated by the 1834 Report, and continued, as we have shown, by the Poor Law Commissioners, and the Poor Law Board down to 1871, obtained the adhesion of the inspectors who had grown up in the traditions of Mr. Longley's Reports of 1871-5, we have been unable to ascertain.[749] Nor is it clear that the partial circulation[750] by the Central Authority of the recommendations of the Royal Commission affected the admonitions against outdoor relief generally, which the inspectors had for nearly thirty years been addressing to the boards of guardians.[751] Four years later the Central Authority took an even more decisive step.
[749] Some of them hardly concealed their dismay. "In some instances," says Mr. Davy, "where Guardians have been for years endeavouring with patient care to administer the Poor Law strictly ... the opinion of the [Local Government] Board with reference to outdoor relief to certain classes of paupers, has been the cause of some change, if not of opinion, at all events of practice, with the result that the amount paid weekly as outdoor relief has increased largely.... This has been notably the case in the Faversham Union.... During the last six months the expenditure has increased about 25 per cent.... In some other Unions ... the effect of the Circular has been still more marked, for the recommendation that adequate relief should be given has been made the occasion for increased grants of outdoor relief all round, the word "adequate" being taken to refer to the amount of money given only.... It cannot be too strongly insisted that adequate relief means not only that the relief should be sufficient for the wants of the pauper, but that it should be the most suitable form of relief for each particular case." Mr. Davy went on to intimate pretty plainly that, in his view, normally and typically, "the only adequate form of relief is an offer for the workhouse" (Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. 87-9).
[750] To Boards of Guardians "outside the Metropolis" only.
[751] It seems, at any rate, not to have affected their practice of compiling statistical tables in which the Unions were contrasted one with another, according to the percentage of the paupers on outdoor relief--irrespective, as we have already observed, of the relative proportions of the aged, among their several populations; and (as must now be added) of the policy of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, which the Central Authority had promulgated.
In the famous pronouncement on Poor Law Administration generally which Mr. Chaplin issued to all boards of guardians in 1900, systematic and adequate outdoor relief to all aged persons who were at once destitute and deserving was laid down as the definite policy of the Central Authority. "It has been felt," runs this Circular, "that persons who have habitually led decent and deserving lives should, if they require relief in their old age, receive different treatment from those whose previous habits and character have been unsatisfactory, and who have failed to exercise thrift in the bringing up of their families or otherwise. The Board consider that aged deserving persons _should not be urged to enter the workhouse at all_ unless there is some cause which renders such a course necessary, such as infirmity of mind or body, the absence of house accommodation, or of a suitable person to care for them, or some similar cause, but that they should be relieved by having adequate outdoor relief granted to them. The Board are happy to think that it is commonly the practice of boards of guardians to grant outdoor relief in such cases, but they are afraid that too frequently such relief is not adequate in amount. They are desirous of pressing upon the guardians that such relief should, when granted, be always adequate."[752] Nor did the Central Authority content itself with merely issuing the Circular. Letters were sent in a few months' time to all the boards of guardians asking what action had been taken with regard to the suggested grant of outdoor relief to aged deserving persons, and, in particular, whether the practice was to grant an adequate amount to each case. The effect was (to use the words of an inspector) to produce "a good deal of discussion ... upon the question of the amount of outdoor relief granted to aged deserving persons."[753] "I rather fear," said another inspector, "that in some unions it has rather been regarded as a sort of mandate to increase the system of out-relief generally. This the Circular did not intend."[754] On the other hand, yet another inspector remarks that only "a few boards have looked at the (Local Government) Board's suggestions from a sympathetic point of view, and have increased their regular allowances to the aged out-paupers, but in a large majority of the unions the guardians state that alteration is not called for.... The principle is ... warding off destitution, not providing maintenance."[755] Whatever was the intention of the Central Authority, it is evident that the replies (which were not published and which we have not seen) that it received to its repeated inquiries must have revealed an enormous diversity of practice, utterly at variance with the principle of national uniformity. In one union there would be hardly any cases for which the guardians would grant outdoor relief at all. In the next union practically every aged applicant would get it. The conception of adequacy revealed in the replies must have been equally various. In the West Riding the amount allowed per aged person ranged from 1s. 6d. a week to as much as 7s. 6d. a week, whereas in the East Riding the variations were only between 2s. 6d. and 5s. for each person.[756] We happen to know that the Bradford Guardians reported that, with greater uniformity, they gave 5s. a week for each deserving aged person.[757] We have not been able to ascertain what action, if any, was taken by the Central Authority on these replies. No objection appears to have been taken, and no criticism to have been made, either in respect of the virtual refusal of outdoor relief to the deserving aged in some unions, or in respect of its almost indiscriminate bestowal in others, or again, in respect of the wide range of variation between union and union, in the amount allowed for each person. It is thus not clear what is now the policy of the Central Authority on these points. Its latest utterance is the Circular of 1900. Since then, so far as we can discover, it has been silent on the subject.
[752] Circular of 4th August 1900; in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. 18-19. This momentous new departure is not referred to in the Annual Report itself. Returns published in the previous year had shown that of the 286,929 paupers over sixty-five on 1st January 1900, only 74,597 were indoor paupers, and of these, only 40,809 were in the workhouses as distinguished from infirmaries, etc. The other 212,332 had outdoor relief. Outside the Metropolis, indeed, eight out of every ten had outdoor relief; one was in the infirmary, and there was only one in the workhouse (Twenty-ninth Annual Report, 1899-1900, p. lvii).
[753] Mr. Bagenal's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 154.
[754] Mr. Wethered's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 133.
[755] Mr. Baldwyn Fleming's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. 112-113.
[756] Mr. Bagenal's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 154.
[757] Local Government Board to Bradford Union, 10th January 1901; Bradford Union to Local Government Board, 26th January 1901; in MS. archives, Bradford Board of Guardians.
(ii.) _Indoor Relief_
Meanwhile there had accumulated in the workhouses of the Metropolis (where the effect of the Metropolitan Common Poor fund had been to offer a premium on indoor relief to two-thirds of the unions), and in those of the unions up and down the country in which Mr. Longley's policy had been more or less carried out, a large number of aged people, who became permanent residents.[758] This fact, already noticeable and officially recorded in 1867,[759] did not lead to any change in the policy of workhouse administration laid down by the Central Authority. The General Consolidated Order of 1847, framed essentially to deal with workhouses in which the able-bodied were the most important feature, was not amended to meet the new conditions. The structural improvements which, as we have already described, began to be adopted after the _Lancet_ inquiry of 1865, continued to be pressed for, and eventually insisted on, so far as regards new workhouses. In this respect the old people in particular unions shared in the general benefit. But we do not find that the Central Authority, after 1871, had any policy of altering the general _régime_ of the old people's wards, corresponding to that which, as we have described, took place with regard to the sick wards. On the contrary, we must note, as part of Mr. Longley's policy, his emphatic warning in 1873, that the workhouses had already become so "attractive to paupers," as to furnish "no test of destitution."[760] He made no exception in favour of the old people's wards. It was, in fact, the "_deterrent discipline_" of the workhouse that he regarded as "the keystone of an efficient system of indoor relief," not merely for the able-bodied, but also, through its effect on the minds of those who were still young, and on the relations of those who were old, also for the aged.[761] We may, therefore, understand why it is that we find, between 1871 and 1892, practically nothing in the way of expression of the policy of the Central Authority with regard to the indoor treatment of the aged. It stood by the General Consolidated Order of 1847.[762] Even the attempt made in 1867-75 to revert to the policy of the 1834 Report, so far as to have specialised institutions for the aged, the sick, and the able-bodied, as well as for the children, was not persisted in, so far as the aged were concerned. No other unions were found to adopt the joint arrangements of Poplar and Stepney under which the aged and infirm of both unions had a workhouse to themselves, and even this one was brought to an end in 1892.[763]
[758] It was not so much that the "offer of the House" increased the aggregate population of the workhouses. Between 1871 and 1891, this only rose, outside the Metropolis, from 131,334 to 139,736. (In the Metropolis, owing to the development of the infirmaries into general hospitals, and the working of the Common Poor Fund, the rise was more considerable, viz. from 36,739 to 58,482). But the workhouse population gradually changed in character, the able-bodied being replaced by the aged. On 1st January 1900, there were found to be, in the workhouses themselves, no fewer than 40,809 persons over sixty-five, and in the workhouse infirmaries, etc., 33,788 more, making a total over sixty-five of 74,597; being more than 38 per cent of the total inmates (Twenty-ninth Annual Report, 1899-1900, p. lvii).
[759] "Able-bodied people are now scarcely at all found in them during the greater part of the year.... Those who enjoy the advantages of these institutions are almost solely such as may fittingly receive them, viz. the aged and infirm, the destitute sick and children. Workhouses are now asylums and infirmaries" (Dr. E. Smith, Medical Officer to the Poor Law Board; in Twentieth Annual Report, 1867-8, p. 43).
[760] Office Minute of 1873.
[761] "Directly on the able-bodied, and more remotely, upon the disabled class of paupers," the term he always used for the aged (Report on Indoor Relief in the Metropolis, in Fourth Annual Report, 1874-5, p. 47).
[762] See _ante_, pp. 54-82.
[763] Special Order of 18th April 1892; Twenty-second Annual Report, 1892-3, p. lxxix. The only item of policy as regards the aged in the workhouse, to be noted between 1871 and 1892, seems to be the insistence by Parliament in 1876 that married couples (who if both persons were over sixty could not since 1847 be made to live separately) might, if the guardians chose to allow it, live together if either person were over sixty, infirm, aged, or disabled (39 and 40 Vic. c. 61, sec. 10). This was communicated to the boards of guardians in 1885 (Circular of 3rd November 1885, in Fifteenth Annual Report, 1885-6, p. 23.) No great attempt was made to get the guardians to provide the necessary separate accommodation, or to make it decently habitable. Thus, at Poplar, there were no rooms for married couples until 1884, and then they were left for fifteen months without any means by which they could be warmed. At last the Central Authority called attention to it (Local Government Board to Poplar Union, 27th May 1886; MS. Minutes, Poplar Board of Guardians, 4th June 1886). It should be noted, too, that it was held that newspapers and periodicals might be provided (_Selections from the Correspondence of the Local Government Board_, vol. iii. 1888, p. 134); and the employment of old men in three workhouses in northern counties in teazing hair, which was excessively distasteful to them, and liable to be injurious to their health, was discontinued at the instance of the inspector (Twentieth Annual Report, 1890-1, pp. 245-6).
In 1892 the note changes. From that date onward we get a distinct reversion, as regards the aged indoor pauper, to the policy indicated in the 1834 Report ("the old might enjoy their indulgences"), from which the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834-47, and the successive Central Authorities of 1847-1892, had turned away.
It is interesting to see that the new departure began over tobacco.[764] The Liverpool Select Vestry determined to give the well-conducted old men in the workhouse the indulgence of a weekly screw of tobacco, whether or not they were employed on disagreeable duties. The auditor objected. The vestry insisted. The Central Authority was obdurate. The local body appealed to its Parliamentary representatives. It was suggested as a compromise that the medical officer might be got to include it in the dietary table, when the Central Authority would not refuse to sanction it.[765] The vestry declined to compromise, and insisted on allowing tobacco as a non-dietetic indulgence. Finally, the inspector was instructed to say that the objection was withdrawn. No publicity was given to the concession, but it gradually leaked out. During the year 1892 we see the Central Authority sanctioning by letter, without any official publication on the subject, such applications as were made by individual boards of guardians to be permitted to allow an ounce of tobacco weekly to the men over sixty in the workhouse.[766] At last, in November 1892, a General Order was issued permitting it in all unions, irrespective of sex, and without limit of amount.[767] Little more than a year later, as some compensation to the old women (though they had not been excluded, in terms, from the indulgence of tobacco or snuff), they were allowed "dry tea," with sugar and milk, irrespective of that provided for in the dietary table.[768] Presently, this indulgence is extended to "dry coffee or cocoa," if preferred, and the men also are allowed to receive it.[769] At last, the Central Authority, by two lengthy Circulars in 1895 and 1896,[770] under the presidency of Sir Henry Fowler and Mr. Chaplin respectively, systematically laid down principles of workhouse administration, so far as the aged were concerned, in sharp contrast with those advocated by Mr. Longley, or indeed, with those which had been inculcated from 1835 to 1892. It was expressly stated that as the character of the workhouse population had so completely changed since 1834, the administration no longer needed to be so deterrent. The old idea of fixed uniform times of going to bed and rising and taking meals was given up, it being expressly left to the master and matron to allow any of the aged (as well as the infirm and the young children) to retire to rest, to rise and to have their meals at whatever hours it was thought fit. The visiting committees of workhouses were now specially enjoined to see that the aged were properly attended to, and recommended to confer with them as to any grievances without any officials being present.[771] It was suggested that the great sleeping wards should be partitioned into separate cubicles. The guardians were reminded that aged or infirm couples might be provided with separate rooms. The well-behaved aged and infirm were to be allowed, within reasonable limits,[772] to go out for walks, to visit their friends, and to attend their own places of worship on Sunday. The rules were to be relaxed to allow them to receive visits in the workhouse from their friends. There was to be no distinctive dress. Those of them who were of good conduct, and who had "previously led moral and respectable lives" were to be separated from the rest, who "are likely to cause them discomfort," and were to have the enjoyment of a separate day-room. The whole note of the administration of the old people's wards of the workhouses was, in fact, to be changed, so far as the Central Authority could change it. In the words of the 1834 Report, the old were to "enjoy their indulgences." Four years later another Circular was issued in stronger terms, reiterating the suggestions of privileges that the guardians ought to allow to the deserving inmates over sixty-five--freedom to rise and go to bed and have their meals when they liked, to have their own locked cupboards for their little treasures, in all cases to have their tobacco and dry tea, to be free to go out when they chose, and to be allowed to receive the visits of their friends. They were to be given separate cubicles to sleep in, and special day-rooms, "which might, if thought desirable, be available for members of both sexes ... and in which their meals, other than dinner, might be served at hours fixed by the guardians."[773] "It is hoped that, where there is room, the guardians will not hesitate to take steps to bring about improvements of the kind indicated in the arrangements for the aged deserving poor."[774] Four or five months later the guardians were stirred up by letter, and asked what they had done towards creating the specially privileged class of deserving aged inmates that had been so strongly pressed on them.[775]
[764] It is not clear from the published documents at what date, or in what unions, the Central Authority had first allowed tobacco. In 1880, it decided that it could not legally be given to workhouse inmates (not being sick), if it had not been specially ordered by the medical officer under arts. 107 and 108 of the General Consolidated Order of 1847 (_Selections from the Correspondence of the Local Government Board_, vol. ii. pp. 3, 72). Yet, by 1885, at any rate, the allowance of tobacco or snuff to non-able-bodied paupers, or to such as were "employed upon work of a hazardous or specially disagreeable character," with permission to smoke in such room as the guardians might determine, had been exceptionally granted in particular cases; _see_, for instance, Special Order to Carlisle of 22nd June 1885, not published in the Annual Report.
[765] "It is the invariable practice," said Mr. Ritchie approvingly, "to provide for the aged paupers a better diet than that for the other classes" (Mr. Ritchie in House of Commons, 6th May 1892; _Hansard_, vol. 4, p. 277).
[766] Local Government Board to Bourne Union, August 1892 (_Local Government Chronicle_, 13th August 1892, p. 678); Local Government Board to Caistor Union, September 1892 (_Ibid._ 8th October 1892, p. 859).
[767] General Order of 3rd November 1892: Circular of 9th November 1892; Twenty-second Annual Report, 1892-3, pp. lxxxv, 35-6.
[768] General Order of 8th March 1894; Twenty-fourth Annual Report, 1894-5, pp. xcix, 4-5.
[769] Special Order to Gateshead, 15th February 1896; _see also_ the "Specimen Order" given in Macmorran and Lushington's _Poor Law Orders_, second edition, 1905, p. 1061.
[770] Circular on Workhouse Administration of 29th January 1895; Memorandum on Visiting Committees of June 1895; Circular on Classification in Workhouses of 31st July 1896; Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, pp. lxxxv, 107-112, 121-3; Twenty-sixth Annual Report, 1896-7, pp. lxxxviii-lxxxix, 9-10.
[771] Memorandum on the Duties of Visiting Committees, June 1895; in Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, p. 122.
[772] Sunday morning, and one day a month, was held to be not sufficient outing. "In the case of aged inmates of respectable character," said Mr. Chaplin "leave of absence might well be allowed on weekdays more frequently than is now the case" [at Old Gravel Lane Workhouse] (_Hansard_, 23rd May 1898, vol. lviii, p. 326).
[773] Circular of 4th August 1900, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 19.
[774] _Ibid._ p. 20. Nor was this merely a formal expression. We see, in the next few years, the Central Authority cordially sanctioning the provision, at no small extra expense in capital and annual maintenance, of new old people's wards in some unions, of specialised old men's and old women's homes in others; even to the extent of permitting (as at Woolwich) the location of the most respectable and best conducted of the aged in a comfortable private mansion conducted with the minimum of rules, and without outward sign of pauperism.
[775] _See_, for instance, Local Government Board to Bradford Union, 10th January 1901, in MS. archives, Bradford Board of Guardians. There were then, in the Bradford workhouse, twenty aged paupers of the first class, and seventeen of the second class. Both these day wards had cushioned armchairs, lockers with keys for each inmate, carpets on the floor, curtains to the windows, and were made comfortable with cushions, coloured table-cloths, pictures, and ornaments. The inmates had special dormitories (Bradford Union to Local Government Board, 26th January 1901). The General Consolidated Order of 1847 was still nominally in force.
During these years the dietaries for the aged and infirm were being altered in the direction of liberality, variety, and freedom of choice. Not only were hot meat or fish dinners provided ("with sauce"), but also tea, coffee, cocoa, milk, sugar, butter, seed cake, onions, lettuce, rhubarb or stewed fruit, sago, semolina, and rice pudding. In 1900 "provision is also made for ... the inmates on special infirm diet ... to receive daily, before bedtime, or at such time as the guardians may fix, a small allowance of milk pudding or similar food to break the interval between the usual meals."[776] The Central Authority in 1904 made no objection to a board of guardians subscribing to a lending library, in order to obtain a constant supply of books for the deserving aged workhouse inmates, and held that no special sanction was required.[777] Finally, "it is open to guardians, if they think fit, to incur reasonable expenses in providing a piano, for use at divine service [and therefore, presumably also at other times, once it was installed] held in a workhouse infirmary for old and infirm inmates;"[778] or to provide a harmonium at the cost of the poor rate for the use of the inmates of the workhouse.[779]
[776] Circular of 11th October 1900; Workhouse Regulations (Dietaries and Accounts) Order, 1900; in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. 65-6. But the Central Authority struck at afternoon tea! The St. George's, Hanover Square, Guardians were informed that it was "not prepared to assent to the proposal of the guardians for the infirm men, and all men over the age of sixty-five years to have half a pint of tea daily at 3.30 P.M., between the mid-day and evening meals" (Local Government Board to St. George's, Hanover Square, November 1900; see _Local Government Chronicle_, 17th November 1900, p. 1147).
[777] _Local Government Chronicle_, 27th August 1904, p. 898; _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1903-4, by W. A. Casson, 1905, p. 97.
[778] Local Government Board's Decision, _Local Government Chronicle_, 1st November 1902, p. 1102; _Decisions of the Local Government Board, 1902-3_, by W. A. Casson, 1904, p. 72.
[779] Local Government Board to St. German's Union, December 1898; _Local Government Chronicle_, 24th December 1898, p. 1192.
_I._--NON-RESIDENTS
There is no change to record in 1871 in the expressed policy of preventing relief to paupers not resident within the union. Such relief (given in order to avoid the expense and hardship of removal) continued in many cases, but was repeatedly blamed by the inspectors. "Non-resident relief is given in almost all the unions ... sixteen per cent of the outdoor paupers of Glendale Union were non-resident."[780] In 1878 the Central Authority suggested that such relief "might be almost entirely discontinued."[780] There has been no explicit abrogation of this policy down to the present day; even in face of representations that it is "harsh and totally out of keeping with the spirit of the times."[781] But from 1871 onwards we have the force of the maxim weakened by the growth of whole classes of cases which the guardians are allowed, and even encouraged, to send to places outside the union, and maintain there. We need do no more than allude to the boarded-out children. Another growing class is that of paupers who are placed in certified schools or homes, either by way merely of boarding-school (frequently recommended as a method of disposing of Roman Catholic children); or for residence in any industrial or reformatory school; or (irrespective of age) for maintenance in an institution for special treatment (blind, deaf and dumb, crippled, epileptic, idiot, etc.); or merely in an asylum for the aged and infirm;[782] or for curative treatment in a hospital, convalescent home, seaside home, or sanatorium.[783] Even able-bodied aged paupers may, as the Poplar Guardians were informed in 1896, be boarded out in country families, under the guise of non-resident relief. The Central Authority has not objected to the transfer of workhouse inmates, provided these do not actively protest, to country workhouses, there to be maintained as non-resident paupers.[784] In one case, indeed, the Central Authority allowed a union to abolish its workhouse altogether (retaining only a casual ward), and approved "arrangements for the boarding-out of the indoor poor in the workhouses of other unions for a period not exceeding five years."[785] It is, therefore, not easy to determine how much is left of the policy of preventing non-resident relief as such.
[780] Third Annual Report, 1873-4, p. 78.
[781] Memorandum relating to the Administration of Out-relief, February 1878, in Seventh Annual Report, 1877-8, p. 224. "The suggestion that non-resident relief should be absolutely abolished is one in which the president is quite disposed to concur, with perhaps, some reservation regarding existing cases" (Local Government Board to Chairman of Central Poor Law Conference, 12th May 1877, in Seventh Annual Report, 1877-8, p. 56).
[782] Bradford Union to Local Government Board, 13th September 1901, forwarding resolution: "That ... the prohibition of non-residential relief to the widow and children of a person who may have died in the union of his settlement is harsh and totally out of keeping with the spirit of the times; and that the provisions of the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order, 1844, and the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order, 1852, call for urgent revision." This received only an acknowledgment (Local Government Board to Bradford Union, 16th September 1901).
[783] _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1903-4, by W. A. Casson, 1905, p. 26.
[784] If guardians wish to make use of the Margate Homes for Sick Paupers, they may do so (as the Central Authority expressly informed them in 1874) _by granting non-resident relief_ (Circular of 1874; _see Local Government Chronicle_, 23rd May 1874, p. 334).
[785] _Local Government Chronicle_, 15th October 1904, p. 1072.
[786] Local Government Board to Woodbridge Union, 26th April 1898; in _Local Government Chronicle_, 14th May 1898, p. 474.
_J._--THE WORKHOUSE
We left the Central Authority in 1871, fully accepting the view that the workhouse was not merely a "test" which few only might be expected to pass or to endure for long, but a place of permanent or long-continued residence for whole classes of paupers. The workhouse population on 1st January 1871 numbered, in fact, 168,073. The Central Authority, reverting to the proposals of the 1834 Report, had accordingly started out to differentiate the workhouse into separate institutions for particular classes (the children, the sick, and, in the Metropolis, also the imbeciles and idiots); to impose an altogether new standard of expensive structural efficiency on the boards of guardians; to press incessantly for new buildings of approved pattern; to increase the healthiness and comfort of the wards for the sick, the aged, and the children; and to make the dietaries for these classes better adapted to their likings and their needs. "Those who enjoy the advantages of these institutions," had said the Central Authority's own medical officer in 1867, "are almost solely such as may fittingly receive them, viz. the aged and infirm, the destitute sick, and children. Workhouses are now asylums and infirmaries."[787] There was, after 1871, no change and no arrest in this policy.[788] So far as the children, the sick, and the aged and infirm were concerned, we have already described its continuance and its progressive development. The improvement of the institutional provision for the pauper, by removing some of the objections to the indiscriminate general workhouse of 1835-65, fitted in, we may say, with the new crusade of the inspectorate against outdoor relief as such. That crusade was, however, for the first twenty years, pushed without regard to whether or not the particular boards of guardians had accepted the new idea of the specialised institutional treatment for particular classes, or were still wedded to the indiscriminate common workhouse, which aimed at being "deterrent." Mr. Longley realised that the higher standard of comfort that was coming to be allowed to the aged, the sick, and the children in a general workhouse inevitably tended to prevent the necessary strictness and severity being applied to the able-bodied. The inspectorate accordingly strove in London to get specialised institutions for the able-bodied also, the result being the "Poplar test workhouse" that we have already described.
[787] Dr. E. Smith, in Twentieth Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1867-8, p. 43.
[788] We may gain an idea of the energy put into the provision of improved accommodation for the indoor poor since 1868, by the total capital expenditure sanctioned for workhouses, etc., by order or letter of the Central Authority. The total so sanctioned during the thirty-four years, 1835-1868, including the initial provision of workhouses after 1834, was £7,079,126 (Twenty-first Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1868-9, pp. 316-17), or no more than an average of £208,209 annually. For the thirty-seven years, 1869-1905, the corresponding sum was no less than £24,609,035 (Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1905-6, p. 608), or an average of £665,109. To this must be added the expenditure of the Metropolitan Asylums Boards for Poor Law purposes only, sick asylums, district schools, etc., which in the first period of thirty-four years was only £571,401, and in the second period of thirty-seven years was £6,810,140 (Twenty-first Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1868-9, pp. 317-18; Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1905-6, p. 609). The total capital outlay sanctioned by the Central Authority for Poor Law purposes during the last thirty-seven years has, therefore, amounted, on an average, to nearly £1,000,000 annually,--the amount for 1905 being £789,373--as compared with little over one-fifth of that sum in the first thirty-four years of the new Poor Law.
In 1874 the Central Authority expressed its regret at the slow progress "towards the permanent classification in separate establishments of the various classes of indoor paupers, other than the sick.... We attach the utmost importance to this improvement of the classification of indoor paupers, which we believe to be a necessary condition of the maintenance of that discipline which lies at the root of an effective administration of indoor relief. This improvement, however, cannot be effected, except at an enormous and almost prohibitory cost, otherwise than by the combination of several boards of guardians for this purpose. Their existing workhouses would, in that event, become available for the separate accommodation of various classes of indoor paupers chargeable to the several combined areas. We are advised that in the existing state of the law it is doubtful whether such a combination can be effected otherwise than by the voluntary action of boards of guardians, which we trust may still take place, and the desirableness of which we shall continue to press upon the guardians."[789] No such combinations took place, and the Central Authority, baffled by the expense and apparently not prepared to adopt the heroic expedient of issuing orders merging several unions in one, abandoned the attempt to get classification by institutions, except with regard to the children and the sick. The able-bodied had to be dealt with in a general workhouse; and we must note, for twenty years after 1871, battling with the ameliorative efforts of the departmental architect, the departmental medical officer, and the departmental educational experts, on behalf of particular classes of inmates, an attempt to make the workhouse more "deterrent" to other classes of paupers.
[789] Third Annual Report, 1873-4, pp. xxv-xxvi.
The most marked increase of severity was directed against the class of "ins and outs," called in America "revolvers," and it took the form of enlarged powers of detention. By an Act of 1871 the guardians were enabled to detain a pauper (other than a vagrant) who gave notice to quit, in any case for twenty-four hours; if he had already discharged himself once or oftener within a month before giving the notice, for forty-eight hours; and if he had so discharged himself more than twice within two months, for seventy-two hours.[790] Under the Act of 1899[791] a pauper may even be compulsorily detained for 168 hours (one week) "if he has, in the opinion of the guardians, discharged himself frequently without sufficient reason."
[790] Pauper Inmates Discharge and Regulation Act 1871, 34 & 35 Vic. c. 108, sec. 4.
[791] Poor Law Act, 62 & 63 Vic. c. 37, sec. 4. The guardians are not obliged to adopt these periods of detention, and if they do so, provision is made for cases of hardship by allowing them, or in the intervals between their meetings the visiting committee, to "exempt, either wholly or partially, any pauper from the operation of this section." The master of the workhouse, too, "may, if the board of guardians be not sitting or the visiting committee be not in attendance, discharge any pauper to whom this section shall apply before the expiration of any such period as aforesaid, if any circumstances shall, in his opinion, require this to be done."
If a pauper escapes from the workhouse during his detention, or while an inmate refuses or neglects to work or to observe the rules, he may be prosecuted as idle and disorderly under the Vagrancy Act of 1824 (5 Geo. IV. c. 83, sec. 3); for a repetition of the offence, or for destroying or damaging his own clothes or any property of the guardians, he becomes liable to the heavier penalty of the rogue and vagabond. The same penalties attach to the wilfully giving a false name or making a false statement for the purpose of obtaining relief, and this clause has been twice revised, so that since 1876 (Divided Parishes and Poor Law Amendment Act, 39 & 40 Vic. c. 61, sec. 44) any person who so obtained relief may be proceeded against at any time while he continues to receive it, and since 1882 (Casual Poor Act, 45 & 46 Vic. c. 36, sec. 5) the provision applies equally, whether the person attempts so to obtain relief for himself or for any one else. If a pauper escapes from a workhouse or asylum while suffering from bodily disease of an infectious or contagious nature, the justice convicting him of the offence may order that he be taken back to the workhouse or asylum and kept there till cured, or otherwise lawfully discharged, and that the warrant of commitment then be put in execution.
With regard to the able-bodied pauper, at any rate for the first fifteen years after 1871, there was to be no leniency. The spirit of the administration, whether of the workhouse or of the casual ward, was that subsequently expressed by Mr. Walter Long. "I would treat the wastrel and the vagabond, and the man who makes his wife and children paupers because of his own degraded habits, in a severe way, and I would make life a burden to him while he remains in the workhouse. I try to insist upon it that in the administration of our workhouses we should make such men realise that if we are compelled to keep them out of the rates we will do it at some discomfort to them."[792] But it was not, in fact, found practicable to avoid improving the accommodation, even for the able-bodied. For them, as for all other inmates, the Central Authority insisted on a sufficient supply of blankets, sheets, bedroom furniture and conveniences. For them, too, the Central Authority insisted on such comforts as knives and forks to eat their meals with--in one case having a long tussle with a recalcitrant board of guardians on this point.[793] The able-bodied shared, too, in the improvement of the cooking which took place, particularly after the general investigation which led to the new Dietaries Order of 1900. "This Order," said an inspector, "has certainly had two good incidental results. It has induced many boards of guardians to engage paid cooks, instead of employing chance inmates knowing nothing about the work ... and the cooking appliances have in many cases been overhauled and improved. In some places they have been of the most rudimentary character."[794] The able-bodied may even get special privileges. Inmates employed on specially heavy work are permitted to receive an extra meal, as lunch. The discretion in this matter at first belonged to the medical officer, but now the guardians have power to order lunch as they think fit. In no case can any inmate claim it as a right, and it is not to be given merely on account of household work. Lunch, when allowed, is very plain, and may not include alcohol. The medical officer is to advise as to the degree of employment necessitating lunch, but the Central Authority suggests that "heavy work," earning lunch for able-bodied men and women, should be taken to mean "an average day's work with sustained exertion, _e.g._ corn-grinding, pumping, stone-breaking or crushing, shifting heavy goods, digging, scrubbing, washing, ironing, etc.," while heavy work for the aged and infirm (or light work for the able-bodied) is "employment without sustained exertion, _e.g._ wood-chopping and wood-bundling, hoeing or weeding, sorting light articles, sewing, etc."[795] Beer was particularly objected to. In 1877 the Hackney Board of Guardians, who wanted to give beer to two paupers who assisted the coachman, were told that they were "legally empowered to require from inmates such labour as might be required without having recourse to exceptional indulgences"--in this case the giving of beer--"which would only, in effect, vitiate the principle of the workhouse being a pauper test."[796] On the other hand, it appears that beer is habitually allowed to the able-bodied inmates of certain workhouses at certain times, in return for work. A number of boards of guardians, having land to cultivate, have been permitted by Special Orders to "make to paupers employed in harvest work on land belonging to the guardians such allowance of food and _fermented liquor_ as may be necessary," without any direction of the medical officer.[797] And when in 1903 an auditor surcharged a workhouse master for beer allowed to certain inmates for work done, it was explained "that if such allowance was withheld, _some of the paupers would leave the workhouse_"--surely a strange threat to make to a Poor Law authority--and with others "difficulties would arise to get them to work." On this explanation the Central Authority (whilst upholding the auditor's decision in point of law) remitted the surcharge.[798] Finally, it may be observed that the shelter of the workhouse was not to be denied to the able-bodied, even for bad conduct. The master must admit all persons who present the proper order, at whatever hour of the day or night. He may not refuse admission even to a man in a state of drunkenness.[799] Nor could a man be punished for being admitted whilst suffering from _delirium tremens_.[800]
[792] _Hansard_, 9th May 1902, vol. 107, p. 1276.
[793] _Local Government Chronicle_, 21st December 1889, p. 1051. This was with the Chester Board, which refused "to allow the workhouse inmates knives and forks at dinner except on Christmas Day." The Central Authority peremptorily required them to be provided for "all the inmates."
[794] Mr. Preston-Thomas's Report, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, p. 126.
[795] Circular on Workhouse Dietaries, 11th October 1900, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. 63-4.
[796] Local Government Board to Hackney Union, January 1877, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 13th January 1877, p. 31.
[797] Special Order to Wirrall Union, 11th June 1886; Special Order to Drayton Union, 2nd September 1892. On the other hand, in 1901 the Keighley Guardians, for harvest work, were only allowed to give extra "food and drink other than fermented liquor" (Special Order to Keighley Union, 1st August 1901).
[798] _Local Government Chronicle_, 7th November 1903, p. 1091.
[799] Local Government Board to Hexham Union, April 1902; _Local Government Chronicle_, 19th April 1902, p. 413; _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1902-3, by W. A. Casson, 1904, pp. 14, 23.
[800] _Local Government Chronicle_, 13th June 1903, p. 577; _Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1902-3, by W. A. Casson, 1904, p. 162.
There is, thus, a marked change of tone after 1885 in workhouse administration, as in other branches of policy. This change of tone becomes specially marked in the Circular of January and the Memorandum of June 1895, in which the newly elected boards of guardians, chosen for the first time on a democratic franchise and without any high rating qualification, were specially instructed as to their administrative duties. These authoritative documents breathe a spirit of humane consideration for the pauper inmates, without excepting the able-bodied, which Mr. Longley would, we think, not have regarded as "deterrent." The medical officer, rather than the master, was to advise the guardians on practically all the points on which the general regimen of the institution depended. The visiting committees were to take care that all the arrangements were in order; they "should satisfy themselves whether there is any structural defect in any part of the house; whether painting or lime-washing is required; whether the wards are clean and provided with such conveniences as lockers or shelves, so that they may be kept in proper order; whether there is any defect in the construction of the sanitary arrangements or in the general sewerage of the house; whether the yards are defective as airing courts or _places of recreation_. The attention of the visiting committee should be carefully directed to the subject of ventilation, which should be effected by special means, apart from the usual means of doors, windows, and fire-places, and should be so arranged that each ward may be brought into uninterrupted communication with the open air."[801] The classes of inmates are to be subdivided "with reference to their moral character or behaviour, or to their previous habits."[802] The employment to be provided is to be "unobjectionable in its character."[803] The clothing of inmates when absent on leave from the workhouse "should not be in any way distinctive or conspicuous in character."[804] The visiting committees are to see that there is always enough underclothing in stock to allow all the inmates the requisite changes; that "sufficient means for ensuring personal cleanliness are provided; that a convenient lavatory, as well as baths,[805] with water laid on, and supplied with towels, soap, and combs, are accessible to each class."[806] "A piece of cocoa fibre matting or other material, or a mattress, should be placed between the bedstead and the bed. A sufficient supply of blankets, sheets, bedroom furniture and conveniences should be provided."[807]
[801] Memorandum of June 1895, in Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, p. 121.
[802] Circular of 29th January 1895, in _ibid._ p. 108.
[803] Memorandum of June 1895, in _ibid._ p. 122.
[804] Circular of 29th January 1895, in _ibid._ p. 111.
[805] It had been ordered already in 1886 that, as regards the bath, every person "should have the right to demand water which has not been previously used" (Minute of Instructions, Bathing of Workhouse Inmates, 2nd February 1886, in Sixteenth Annual Report, 1886-7, p. 1).
[806] Memorandum of June 1895, in Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1895-6, p. 122.
[807] _Ibid._ p. 121.
It remains only to mention the great improvement in the workhouse dietary carried out, after prolonged inquiries, in the General Order of 1900.[808] During the preceding twenty years there had been but little attention paid to the subject. The Central Authority had, in 1871, sanctioned the use of Australian tinned meat.[809] It had also authorised in over a hundred unions fish dinners once a week.[810] In 1892 it had drawn attention to the great variation among unions in the amount of alcoholic drink consumed.[811] In 1896 it had engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Chorlton Board of Guardians, and others elsewhere, who objected to the waste involved in supplying each inmate with a fixed and weighed-out allowance of bread, and who found by experiment that much less was used (and very much less thrown into the pig-trough) if the paupers were allowed to help themselves at meals without stint. The Central Authority long resisted this subversive proposal, and insisted on the General Consolidated Order of 1847 being obeyed. When the rebellious boards persisted, the Central Authority gave way--not, however, amending its Orders, but permitting, by letter, the breach of them.[812] An official Departmental Committee appointed to consider the matter advised the president that the injunction of the Order to weigh out a fixed ration to each pauper might with advantage be abandoned in the case of bread.[813] But when, in 1901, the Association of Poor Law Unions asked that the same principle should be applied to vegetables, the Central Authority consented only to bear the suggestion in mind.[814]
[808] Workhouse Regulations (Dietaries and Accounts) Order, 1900, in Thirtieth Annual Report, 1900-1, pp. cvii. 62-72.
[809] _Knight's Official Advertiser_, 21st October 1871, p. 196.
[810] Thirteenth Annual Report, 1883-4, p. lii.
[811] Circular of 15th December 1892, in Twenty-second Annual Report, 1892-3, p. 43.
[812] MS. archives, Chorlton Board of Guardians, 1895, etc.; _Local Government Chronicle_, 11th January 1896, p. 33; 8th February 1896, p. 121.
[813] This was also permitted by letter to the Grantham Board of Guardians (Local Government Board to Grantham Union, November 1901; _Local Government Chronicle_, 7th December 1901, p. 1209); and doubtless to others. The Central Authority had, in fact, intimated its willingness "to consider applications" for a similar concession "from the guardians of large unions" (Local Government Board to Association of Poor Law Unions, 13th March 1901; _Local Government Chronicle_, 23rd March 1901, p. 295).
[814] Local Government Board to Association of Poor Law Unions, 13th March 1901; _Local Government Chronicle_, 23rd March 1901, p. 295. We cannot find that, down to the present day, any such permission has been given.
In 1900 the new Dietaries Order, as we have already mentioned, greatly increased the nutritive value, variety, and attractiveness of the diets allowed; whilst the accompanying Memorandum formulated a whole code of suggestions for the improvement of the meals.[815]
[815] On no account are the paupers, if allowed "milk," to be put off with "skim milk" or "scald milk"; by a decision of 1903, "milk" means always new milk (_Decisions of the Local Government Board_, 1902-3, by W. A. Casson, 1904, p. 11.)
_K._--EMIGRATION
For many years after 1871 there is no change, either of policy or of practice, to record as to emigration, beyond the continuance and slow growth of a tiny trickle of child emigration to Canada. Down to recent years, at any rate, the Colonies expressed a decided objection to any Poor Law emigration of adults, being, as the Central Authority explained, "unwilling to run the risk of thus receiving persons of bad character, or those who, from weak health or other causes, might become burdensome to them," and "in consequence of representations which have been made by the Government of the United States" the Central Authority feels itself "precluded from sanctioning any expenditure from the poor rates in connection with the emigration to that country."[816] Nevertheless, the Act of 1849 had not been repealed and the guardians were not debarred from emigrating, not paupers only, but any poor persons settled in their unions, whether in receipt of relief or not. The number so emigrated (apart from orphan or deserted children) continued, however, to be small.[817] In 1905 the Central Authority, under Mr. Long's presidency, in connection first with the relief of the unemployed by the guardians, and then under the Unemployed Workmen Act, revived the old policy of 1835-53 and expressly encouraged the emigration, at the public expense, of suitable persons, whether or not otherwise in receipt of aid from the rates.[818]
[816] Memorandum on Emigration at the cost of the poor rate, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 26th October 1889, pp. 884-5.
[817] In 1883-4 there were 296 persons emigrated; in 1885-6, 133 persons; between 1887 and 1898 the number fell from 301 to 12; it began to revive in 1903, when it was 66; in 1905 it was 317 (_see_ Thirteenth, Fifteenth, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-third and Thirty-fifth Annual Reports).
[818] Mr. Long in House of Commons, 2nd March 1905 (_Hansard_, vol. 142, p. 184).
Meanwhile, the emigration of Poor Law children to Canada continued, special applications for the sanction of the Central Authority having to be made in each case.[819] The question of the superior position in which such children were thus placed, compared with those of the lowest grade of independent labourer, does not appear to have been raised. The emigration and special supervision in Canada were the subject of repeated circulars and correspondence.[820] The numbers of orphan and deserted children thus removed to superior conditions rose, from 100 or 200 annually, to 398 in 1903 and 491 in 1905.[821]
[819] Memorandum on Emigration, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 26th October 1889, p. 885.
[820] Memorandum of April 1883; Thirteenth Annual Report, 1883-4, pp. xlvii.-xlix. 32-3; Fifteenth Annual Report, 1885-6, pp. xxxvi.-xxxvii. 61-5; Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, p. cxxxv.
[821] Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, p. 587.
_L._--RELIEF ON LOAN
We note, without any explicit change of policy, a growing tendency to extend the sphere of relief on loan. It is in Mr. Corbett's Report of 1871 that we find a revival of the suggestion thrown out in 1840 that medical relief, in particular, might be given on loan; and even that it should be "generally granted by way of loan,"[822] without regard, it would seem, to the probability of its being recovered. This opinion of the inspectorate, though (as we gather) constantly pressed on boards of guardians, did not, in 1877, receive the explicit endorsement of the Central Authority. An influential proposal to make all relief (and especially all medical relief) recoverable as if given on loan was definitely negatived. "The policy of the existing law," it was declared, "is that the question whether or not relief shall be granted on loan, or, in other words, whether it shall be recoverable at a future time, is to be determined by a consideration of the actual circumstances existing at the time the relief is granted, and it would be at variance with that policy if every recipient of relief were to feel that after he again succeeded in obtaining employment any savings he might be able to put by would be liable for the repayment of the relief which he might have received."[823] This seems to be the latest declaration of policy. There is a particular difficulty in the way of granting medical relief on loan when the medical officer is paid by salary, which does not arise when he is paid by fee--namely, that of fixing the amount to be recovered. The Central Authority suggested that the difficulty might perhaps be met by paying him partly by fee and partly by salary, but it expressed no decided views as to either the practicability or the expediency of such a course.[824]
[822] Mr. Corbett's Report of 10th August 1871. Mr. Longley repeated the suggestion (Third Annual Report, 1873-4, p. 156).
[823] Letter to Chairman of the Central Poor Law Conference, 12th May 1877, in Seventh Annual Report, p. 54.
[824] _Ibid._
Moreover, the Central Authority held that "the relieving officer has no power to compel any applicant to accept relief on loan. If, therefore, in a case of sudden or urgent necessity a person refuses to accept the offer of medical relief upon the condition that the cost thereof be repaid, the Board consider that the relieving officer would not be exempt from all further responsibility in the case, unless he had reason to believe that the applicant was in a position to procure the requisite medical aid without assistance from the poor rate."[825] When it was laid down in 1876 that no relief to a lunatic could be recovered unless and until declared to be on loan, it was remarked that "it will be incumbent upon the guardians ... to examine each case ... to consider all its circumstances, and not to declare the relief to be given on loan, until they are satisfied that the circumstances will justify such a declaration." Nor was it permissible to fix the value of medical relief at an arbitrary sum. "There are great practical difficulties," concludes the Central Authority in 1886, "in the way of determining the value of such relief," for the purpose of recovering it when made on loan.[826]
[825] _Selections from the Correspondence of the Local Government Board_, vol. ii. 1880, pp. 70, 110.
[826] _Ibid._ vol. i. 1880, p. 15; _ibid._ vol. iii. 1888, p. 271.
Thus, it can perhaps not fairly be said that the inspectors' policy of using the power of granting relief on loan as a means of deterring applicants from applying for or accepting it, has received formal endorsement by the Central Authority. On the other hand, unions which have adopted the policy of systematically granting all medical relief on loan, irrespective of the applicant's circumstances, have--so far as we can discover--not been reproved or criticised by the Central Authority for what is, apparently, a breach of its instructions. On a complaint being made of this practice, the Bradfield Board of Guardians contended that it was justified; and their contention was apparently upheld.[827] And the practice of the Bristol Board of Guardians of granting all outdoor relief on loan, irrespective of the applicant's circumstances, or even of his actual acceptance of it as a loan, has not been stopped. Moreover, by the Feeding of School Children Order, the Central Authority (in apparent contradiction of its decision in 1877) directed such relief to be given on loan irrespective of the father's circumstances.[828]
[827] Local Government Board to Bradfield Union, February 1893; Bradfield Union to Local Government Board, 21st March 1893; MS. archives, Bradfield Board of Guardians; _The Better Administration of the Poor Law_, by Sir. W. Chance, 1895, pp. 123-4.
[828] General Order of 26th April 1905, in Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, pp. 321-2.
_M._--CO-OPERATION WITH VOLUNTARY AGENCIES
We left Mr. Goschen and the Poor Law Board much impressed with the value of systematic and organised co-operation with voluntary organisations in order to avoid the combination of outdoor relief with any other source of income. In 1873 we find an interesting report by Miss Octavia Hill on official and voluntary agencies in administering relief, which the Central Authority published and commended.[829] But, in spite of Mr. Goschen, the boards of guardians by no means invariably accepted the doctrine of never giving outdoor relief in aid of other pecuniary resources. The Brixworth Guardians, indeed, as part of their strict policy, refused to accord any favour to the person having an allowance from a friendly society; but even they seem to have made up from the poor rate the amount necessary for full maintenance. Most other boards of guardians, however, as the Central Authority was officially informed in 1873, reckoned, by a rough compromise, the friendly society pay at half its amount,[830] in flat contradiction of the dictum of the Central Authority of 1840 and 1870.[831] This course was incidentally reproved by the Central Authority in 1888. "The guardians," it was stated, "are bound to take into consideration all the means of support possessed by the applicant; ... if ... the allowance from the club or society appears to the guardians to be inadequate to meet all the requirements of the case, they should take such allowance into account in determining what amount of relief is required to relieve the destitution of the applicant."[832] It was, however, apparently found impracticable to take any official action; and there is, until 1894, scarcely any later mention of the subject.[833] The policy of "all or nothing," which Mr. Goschen had suggested as a counsel of perfection, was, in fact, not persisted in by the Local Government Board. The practice of making up insufficient incomes, whether derived from charity, from property or friendly society allowance or annuity, or even (in the case of women) from earnings, continued; not infrequently with the explicit sanction of the Central Authority.[834] In 1894 the policy of supplementing other resources received a partial sanction from Parliament. By the Outdoor Relief Friendly Societies Act 1894, boards of guardians were legally empowered if they thought fit, to ignore the fact that an applicant for relief had a friendly society allowance.[835] This gave a legal sanction to the usual compromise of counting such an allowance at half its value, and thus giving the thrifty person half the advantage of his thrift. It is difficult to see how the case of a person having a small friendly society allowance could be logically distinguished from that of a person having other means or sources of income insufficient to maintain him. Presently the Central Authority expressly extended the new doctrine to other forms of saving. In 1903 it declared that relief in supplement of property (in case of sickness or infirmity of the applicant or any dependent) was lawful. In the case of an applicant actually possessing property, "if the guardians are satisfied, after due inquiry, that the means possessed by an applicant are insufficient to support himself and family, they are empowered, subject to the regulations in force, to grant such relief as will meet the necessities of the case."[836] In the following year Parliament followed suit by expressly enacting that boards of guardians should not under any circumstances take into consideration any friendly society allowance up to 5s. a week.[837] There is, accordingly, in 1907 reported to be much outdoor relief avowedly given in supplement of charitable aid and other sources of income.
[829] Third Annual Report, 1873-4, pp. 126-30.
[830] Mr. Culley's Report, in Third Annual Report, 1873-4, p. 75.
[831] Minutes of Poor Law Commissioners, 1840; Poor Law Board to Mr. R. H. Paget, M.P., 5th January 1870, in Twenty-second Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1869-70, pp. 108-11.
[832] _Selections from the Correspondence of the Local Government Board_, vol. iii. 1888, p. 77.
[833] Once or twice it is mentioned by the inspectors; _e.g._ by Mr. Baldwyn Fleming in 1889 (Eighteenth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1888-9, p. 115), and again in 1891 (Twentieth Annual Report, 1890-1, p. 225).
[834] Thus, in 1901, sanction was obtained by the Bradford Guardians for the grant of non-resident relief in certain specific cases into which they had made careful inquiry. Among the cases thus accidentally reported for sanction, because they happened to be those of "non-resident paupers," were those of grants of 2s. to 6s. a week, in supplement of family incomes of 7s. to 26s. (Bradford Union to Local Government Board, 30th November 1901; MS. archives, Bradford Board of Guardians).
[835] 57 & 58 Vic. c 25.
[836] Local Government Board decision in _Local Government Chronicle_, 6th June 1903, p. 552.
[837] 4 Edw. VII. c. 32, sec. 1 (Outdoor Relief Friendly Societies