CHAPTER XIV

THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES

2. THE WORKHOUSE.

Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship that is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper.

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Pauperism is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid unveracities and God-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other.

THOMAS CARLYLE: "Latter-day Pamphlets," "The New Downing Street."

The current cant of the day is that the alehouse leads to the workhouse. From an architectural and hygienic point of view they have much in common, and perhaps when one comes to spend one's last years amid the unloveliness and official squareness and coldness of the workhouse one will be able to look back with a sense of grateful pleasure to the more natural squalor of the alehouse. It is a zoological fact that the human pauper, escaped for the day from a workhouse, makes like a homing bird for the alehouse, wherefrom we may draw the conclusion that the public for whom our two public houses are provided by an intelligent State prefer the alehouse as the lesser abomination of the two.

I often wonder if there is any nation in the world that possesses an appetite equal to that of our own people for Royal Commissions and reports. I admit that I have the craving strongly myself--not to sit upon Commissions, for I am a working man and the amusement is one for Bishops, Law Lords, philanthropists and the leisured classes--but I buy the reports when they come out and sometimes read them--or some of them--or some part of them--and marvel at the patience and energy and research that have gone to the making of them, and sigh over the pity of it and the heart-breaking inutility of the whole business.

Here is the report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909. The blue cover of my copy is already turning grey with old age, the pencil marks I made in the margin when I read it five years ago remind me of the splendid reforms that spread themselves out in its pages and made one feel that after all the world was a better affair than one had hitherto believed. This report is indeed literally a monument of industry. It sat from 1905 to 1909. There are over twelve hundred pages in the report itself, which you can buy for the trumpery sum of five and six. The evidence of it is contained in many volumes, and if your library is large enough and you can afford to pay the price of a large paper set, you would have reading enough for the rest of your natural life. And what has come of it all? Practically nothing. It is not to be supposed that either the report or the evidence has ever been read and studied by our ministers and rulers. A few magazine and newspaper articles have been made of it, then perhaps a book or two are written on the subject, the origin of which you can trace to the report, and after that gradually the thing sinks by its own cumbrous weight into the dead limbo of forgotten state papers. Yet if there was a problem called the reform of the Poor Law in 1905 worthy of the consideration of the good men and women who gave up a large slice of their lives to working at it surely in 1914 there is still such a problem, and some of it is at least as urgent as the questions over which our political pastors wrangle and fight with such splendid energy. To write an essay on the law and the poor in relation to the relief of distress would be to traverse the whole ground of this famous report, but for my own part I only want to call attention to an institution typical of all the faults and errors of the Poor Law--the workhouse.

For if the rich have by their laws made a mess of the alehouse, what about the other public-house--the workhouse? When you have no money to enable you to take your ease at your inn the only other hostelry open for you and your wife and children is the Poor House.

If there is one subject that has a more confused melancholy legal history than another it is the story of the workhouse. No doubt much has been done and something is doing, but it is difficult to see the real metal of the reformer's work for the great heaps of Poor Law dirt that our forefathers have left for us to clear away. For years the great English General Mixed Workhouse has been looking for trouble. It has not a friend even in the Local Government Board Office, and it has been condemned by all right-minded men and women time out of mind as an abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Yet there it is. A blockhouse, invented, built, and governed by blockheads, or at least beings with wooden blocks instead of human hearts. It is mournful to read the Poor Law history of the last eighty years and to learn how little we have done to dry the tears of the widows and orphans who become, through folly, misfortune, or ill-regulated industry, the wards of the State.

And to understand how such an institution came into our midst, it is necessary to look back a bit upon the natural history of our Poor Law.

Whatever our failings may be as practical statesmen capable of translating philanthropic theory into practical statutory right action, no one can deny we are a great people for ideals. And the ideal of our Poor Law has from earliest days been excellent. Coke in his Institutes tells us that it was ordained by Kings before the Conquest that the poor should be sustained by parsons, rectors, and parishioners, "so that no one should die from lack of sustenance." That was, and still is, the ideal. No citizen is to die from lack of sustenance, and yet surely since the Conquest, and even recently in our own time, some perverse person has escaped the careful eyes of the parsons, rectors, and parishioners, and crept away to an obscure corner there to die of hunger against the ordinance of Kings in that case made and provided.

Coke got this phrase from Andrew Horn, the author or editor of that excellent treatise "La Somme appelle Mirroir des Justices," which he must have compiled somewhere before 1328, though it was first printed in 1624. Horn's "Mirror of Justices," is not, I believe, regarded with great reverence by the learned as a law-book, but Coke enjoyed it and quoted it with approval, and whether or not some of its phrases were ever sound law I dare not express an opinion, but I will vouch for the excellence of Andrew's sympathies.

In writing of the criminal law he tells us that "the poor man who to escape starvation takes victuals to sustain his life, or a garment to prevent death by cold, is not to be adjudged to death if he had no power to buy or to borrow, for such things are warranted by the law natural."

I suppose it is doubtful if this was ever good common law to be acted upon in all criminal courts, but one admires old Andrew for setting it down and is glad to learn that even in the beginning of the fourteenth century there were writers on law who were trying to mitigate the rigour of the law in favour of the poor. They may not have actually stated what the law exactly was, but they had shrewd ideas at the back of their minds as to what it ought to be. If they confused the two themselves at times, and this confused other learned ones in after times, maybe no one has been much the worse for it. And when Horn laid down in his quaint dog French that "Les povres fusent sustenuz par les persones rectours des eglises e par les paroisiens," I fear he was writing of what ought to be rather than what was the existing common law of the relief of the poor.

I am not at all sure that leaving the matter in the hands of parsons and parishioners has not been the cause of most of the failure of the Poor Law. If you have studied parsons and parishioners as a class, you do not find them peculiarly desirous of providing sustenance for others. Queen Elizabeth--a very practical lady, much thought of by parsons and parishioners--was evidently of the opinion that you were asking too much for the poor when you said that they should have sustenance for nothing. She it was who enacted that in return for the ideal Saxon sustenance, which was apparently to be freely given, the poor person was now to give his work. Churchwardens and overseers, instead of giving free relief had power to set to work children whose parents could not maintain them, and make their parents work too if necessary. This was the beginning of the system that made you chargeable on the parish, and gave the parish a right to make you work off some of your chargeability.

In the eighteenth century came the interesting and disastrous experiment of indiscriminate out-door relief. The farmer parishioner discovered he could get a cheaper labourer by making his fellow parishioners pay some of the wages in out-door relief. A pauper was a better tenant to have, since the rent was paid out of the poor rates, a bastard child was an asset in a household, and in 1821 overseers are known to have shared out the pauper labourers among themselves and their friends and paid for the labour wholly out of the poor-rate.

The scandals that had arisen led to the reform of the Poor Law in 1834, which placed the administration in the hands of Commissioners who were to see that the law was carried out, and by a natural swing of the pendulum they turned from an indiscriminate doling out of rates to favoured paupers to a system whereby the labourer was to find that the parish was his hardest taskmaster so as to induce him to keep away from the overseers and make parish relief his last and not his first resource. The ideal that the Commissioners stood out for was that no relief whatever was to be given to able-bodied persons or to their families otherwise than in well-regulated workhouses. This was the beginning of the workhouse system which really made the workhouse a kind of prison for those who could not find work outside.

A great deal has been done since then, and especially in recent years, to mitigate the lot of the poor. Old Age Pensions, Labour Exchanges, Medical Insurance, Unemployment Insurance and the enlightened administration of some of the better Boards of Guardians have made great inroads on the negative inhumanity of the workhouse system. But unless it be in some of the more vigorous northern centres Poor Law work and Poor Law elections rouse but little enthusiasm. There are no doubt many men and women who enter into the service of the Poor Law from noble motives and do useful work, but the good they can do is very limited. The Central Authority seems to have no very settled ideals, different boards run different policies, some hanker after the flesh pots of labour cheapened by indiscriminate relief, others clamour for lower rates obtained by the inhumanity of not allowing anything but indoor relief. The guardians whose voices are raised only in the interests of the poor are scarcely heard by those who are clamouring for a lowering of the rates.

One thing all reformers seem to be agreed upon, and that is that the General Mixed Workhouse with good, bad, and indifferent men, women, and children herded together within its four walls is an abomination of desolation. Maybe it did its work in the past as part of the evolution of the Poor Law, dragging it out of a slough of corrupt and unwholesome administration, but a time has surely come when we can apply more scientific remedies to prevent the recurrence of such scandals, and there is no longer a necessity to sacrifice the lives and happiness of decent men, women, and children by the continuance of our workhouse system.

For what is a General Mixed Workhouse? It is an institution that has been officially condemned since the Commissioners of 1834 went their rounds and made their report. Crowded together in the workhouses of that day they found a number of paupers of different type and character, neglected children under the care of any sort of pauper who would undertake the task, bastard children, prostitutes, blind persons, one or two idiots, and an occasional neglected lunatic. There was enough humanity among the Commissioners of eighty years ago to see that what was urgently necessary was classification; the aged and the really impotent wanted care, peace, and comfort, the children wanted nursing, supervision, and education, hard working men and women in misfortune did not want to live in close proximity to the "work shy" and the "ins and outs." "Each class," says the Report, "should receive an appropriate treatment; the old might enjoy their indulgences without torment from the boisterous; the children be educated and the able-bodied subjected to such courses of labour and discipline as will repel the indolent and the vicious." This was reported of the workhouse in 1834, this is again reported of the workhouse in 1909; there seems every reason to believe that it will be once more reported of the workhouse in 2000.

Of course, many things are better to-day than they were eighty years ago. A different standard of sanitation and hygiene has arisen throughout the country and some of it has found is way into the workhouse. We have Poor Law schools and Poor Law infirmaries that were unthought of in those days and, as a whole, our buildings are clean and healthy; there is no ill-treatment in them as there was in the days of Bumble; food, clothing and warmth are at least sufficient; and in communities where there is an exceptional Board and a superior master and matron much is done to hinder the obvious evils of promiscuity. Nevertheless, the evil overshadows the good, for it is the institution itself--the workhouse--that is as radically unwholesome and unfit to-day as it was in 1834.

The evils of promiscuity cannot be exaggerated. In the larger workhouses male and female inmates dine together, work together in kitchens and laundries and in the open yards and corridors, with results that are obvious. In a fortuitous assembly of such people the lowest common denominator of morality is easily adopted as the standard. What a terrible place is a General Mixed Workhouse to which to send children or young people. One cannot read some of the passages in the report for which Mrs. Sidney Webb and her colleagues were responsible without shuddering at our own guiltiness and folly as ratepayers for allowing these things to be done in our name. "No less distressing," they say, "has it been to discover a continuous intercourse which we think must be injurious between young and old, innocent and hardened. In the female dormitories and day rooms women of all ages and of the most varied characters and conditions necessarily associate together without any kind of restraint on their mutual intercourse. There are no separate bedrooms; there are not even separate cubicles. The young servant out of place, the prostitute recovering from disease, the feeble-minded woman of any age, the girl with her first baby, the unmarried mother coming in to be confined of her third or fourth bastard, the senile, the paralytic, the epileptic, the respectable deserted wife, the widow to whom out-door relief has been refused, are all herded indiscriminately together. We have found respectable old women annoyed by day and by night by the presence of noisy and dirty imbeciles; idiots who are physically offensive or mischievous, or so noisy as to create a disturbance by day or night with their howls, are often found in Workhouses mixing with others, both in the sick wards and in the body of the house."

This picture is foul and detestable enough, but it is perhaps in the treatment of children that the workhouse system causes the greatest unintentional cruelty. There are some 15,000 children actually living in General Mixed Workhouses. A large proportion of these have no separate sick ward for children, and no quarantine wards if there should be such a thing as an outbreak of measles or whooping cough. Young children are to be found in bed, with minor ailments, next to women of bad character under treatment for contagious disease, whilst other women in the same ward are in advanced stages of cancer and senile decay. Children come in daily contact with all the inmates, even the imbeciles and feeble minded are to be found at the same dining table with them. In this huge State nursery the nurses are almost universally pauper inmates, many of them more or less mentally defective. A medical Inspector's report in 1897, stated that in no less than "sixty four Workhouses imbeciles or weak-minded women are entrusted with the care of infants." One witness states that she has "frequently seen a classed imbecile in charge of a baby." In the great palatial workhouses of London and other large towns the Commissioners found that "the infants in the nursery seldom or never got into the open air." They found the nursery frequently on the third or fourth story of a gigantic block, often without balconies, whence the only means of access, even to the workhouse yard, was a lengthy flight of stone steps down which it was impossible to wheel a baby carriage of any kind. There was no staff of nurses adequate to carrying fifty or sixty infants out for airing. "In some of these workhouses," they write, "it was frankly admitted that the babies never left their own quarters, and the stench that we have described, during the whole period of their residence in the workhouse nursery."

Seventy years have passed since it was written, and yet the "Cry of the Children" has as much meaning for us as it had for our grandfathers.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are sleeping in the nest, The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blowing toward the west-- But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free.

And I am far from suggesting that all this evil is the result of any personal inhumanity of Boards of Guardians, Masters or Matrons or of their Inspectors and Governors in higher places. It is a matter in which each individual citizen must bear his share of blame for he knows it to exist, and he knows that he can have it altered if he cares to put his hand deep enough into his pocket, or if he will forgo some of the political luxuries dear to his party heart and give up the expenditure on them to the betterment of little children.

Other European countries have managed to classify their poor. In France the medical patients go to hospitals, the infirm aged poor have special "hospices," and the blind and the idiots are separated from the little children, each having their appropriate establishments. Of course we take a great and to some extent justifiable pride in our Local Government institutions, but as the world becomes more complex and difficult, it is beginning to be seen that backward and less intelligent districts do not get the full value out of legislation and rates that a progressive and vigorous district obtains. It is one thing to pass an Act of Parliament and another thing to get a local elective body to administer it intelligently. If we could level up the worst administration of Guardians to the best, a great deal would be done, but there is no manner of doubt that the State ought to impose a time limit on the General Mixed Workhouse and to enact that after such a date no Board of Guardians shall be allowed to house men, women, and children in the unclassified barracks in use to-day. If any body of Guardians do not feel capable of carrying out such a decree the State must take their job over and do it for them.

For eighty years the law makers have been told by their own experts what their workhouses were, and why they ought to be abolished and the fact that the greatest sufferers from the iniquity are poor children who cannot voice their complaints, and exist in dumb ignorance of the wrongs that are done to them, does not make our position as the wrong-doers any less deserving of damnation.