Old age pensions and insurance and free education are, similarly, great advantages to the workers, in which we may justly take some pride, but they do not promise to abolish or greatly diminish poverty. The pension, or the insurance benefit, is necessarily granted on the poverty scale, and is in some sense a recognition of it as one of the permanent institutions of life; and the elementary instruction which we give has raised the qualifications for work, as well as the equipment, so that the proportion of unemployed, or ill-employed, is little changed. Nor would it be entirely wrong to say that, in relieving the poor man of the direct charge of education and insurance, we have put the difference on his rent.
Of our poor-law system, that lamentable compromise with a stupid old tradition, it is difficult to speak with patience. The able-bodied idlers of our workhouses and our countryside are a mockery of the workers. The tramp, the professional idler in search of idleness, maintained in his repulsive ways by an undiscriminating system of poor-housing and by a large body of “charitable” women, is one of the quaintest survivals of an older order. His father idled through life before him, and he in turn drags along the road a mate and children who will sustain the ignoble tradition. He ought to be washed, clothed, and put on an industrial estate; and, if his disease prove incurable, he ought to be anaesthetised out of existence, or at least prevented from reproducing his like.
