FARM LABOURERS,
THEIR
FRIENDLY SOCIETIES, AND THE POOR LAW.
The following article will treat of the means of improving the condition of the agricultural classes of this country, by the development of trustworthy insurances suited to their requirements. It will be necessary to our purpose to consider the bearing of the Poor Law, and the influences exerted by it in diminishing and retarding efforts which might be made by farm labourers to attain a position superior to that now commonly occupied by them, and alterations will be suggested in the mode of affording relief and collecting the rate, by the adoption of which labourers who now on their view of the rate commonly waste their surplus wages in societies, miscalled benefit clubs, may be induced and encouraged either to improve and reform their societies, or to forsake them and join better.
Burial societies, their cost and management, will form no part of our subject. A Commission of Enquiry can alone deal satisfactorily with them, and there is sufficient in the state of these societies to render enquiry under a Royal Commission desirable, even if there were no other classes of industrial insurance than burial societies in need of attention.[1] Neither shall we deal with the state of the friendly societies of the superior artisan and labourer, who commonly seek such advice and protection as the Registrar-General is able to afford them. The members of these institutions have for many years struggled hard to obtain a provision for their need, such as the friendly society offers, and now that many difficulties, among which want of money is not to be reckoned, have been overcome, they will find their task less arduous than hitherto. That they will succeed in the long run in securing an independent provision by insurances best adapted to their wants is not so much a matter of uncertainty as a question of time.
No such hopeful prospect, however, is in store for those whose
- ↑ The Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, after reporting that the attention of four of the Assistant-Commissioners was specially directed to the subject of benefit societies, report? that it is "one of far too wide a nature, embracing as it does the town as well as the country populations, to be callable of being exhaustively dealt with in the course of our enquiries."
