A NOTE ON PAUPERISM.
By Florence Nightingale.
SEVEN MILLIONS of pounds are spent annually in this great London of ours, in relief, Poor Law and charitable.
And with what result?
To increase directly and indirectly the pauperism which it is meant to relieve. Pauperism in London has doubled in the last ten years.
The evil is become so pressing that Poor Law administrators, the charitable, the philanthropists, even the political economists are beginning to turn their attention to it, and no longer to spend or to sanction the spending, or to prevent the spending of money without looking where we are going.
And first as to charity:—the same tie unites us to God and to every one of our fellows. Therefore the ill-use or neglect (worst kind of ill-use) of every imbecile old woman or dirty child is a sort of treason against the Almighty. Love to God is synonymous with love to man. But the love which leads to pauperising man is neither one nor the other.
All paupers who can move arm or leg can more or less support themselves.
The first thing to do is:—to remove all the sick (incapable) out of workhouses and provide for their cure or care. This is, in a considerable measure, being done or about to be done.
The next is:—not to punish the hungry for being hungry, but to teach the hungry to feed themselves.
Statesmen fancy this is to be done by 'education,'—the three R's—teaching the laws of nature.
Now some of the very greatest rascals that ever lived are those who knew the laws of nature best.
In a country where local self-government has trenched largely on the fourth R—rascaldom—every body knows the three R's.
But the greatest sovereign the world ever saw, Charlemagne, organised the civil polity of Western Europe at a time when scarcely anybody could either read or write.
There have been those and are to this day, who applied themselves not only to teach the laws of nature but to teach men how to live.
The only way to teach paupers to support themselves is the way of the early Benedictines—of St. Bernard of Clairvaux—a way practised by some excellent Protestants at the present day.
The Benedictines set themselves down where everybody robbed his neighbour, and invited any to join them who would, not only obey, but work and get others to work.
Clairvaux was a colony, a colony for agriculture, carpenters, smiths' work, and many other things besides learning.
Early monasticism did this for all. And all learnt, but a residuum of pure paupers. These will always require to be taught how to feed themselves.
When a government delivers up its own responsibility into the charge of its subordinates who are permanent, it pays a staff to prevent human progress.
The best work the world has seen has been paid work. But for any one of us to deliver up his or her charity, his or her personal responsibility as to every imbecile old woman, as to every dirty child, into the hands of a paid staff, into the hands of any staff indeed, paid or unpaid, is to salve over the sore which we ought to heal.
As has been well said: 'Work is the strongest of our instincts, and the first of our necessities; and in work we either command or we
