cottager at an expense, covering everything, of 9l. a year. Here it has been proved what family kindness, shown even by strangers, will do to depauperise.
It is well known that a pauper child must be removed from all his pauper associations, in order not to turn out a pauper. He must not even be apprenticed in the parish whence he comes, otherwise he and his children will turn out paupers for ever.
'Nearly one fifth return to the workhouse of those brought up in workhouse or district schools.'
On the other hand, 'it is a rare thing,' says the Edinburgh Inspector of Poor, 'for either a boy or a girl' put out to board with a cottager, as above described, 'to become chargeable to the parish in after life;' that is, if you remove children from their 'hereditary pauperism,' educate them, body and mind, you may make them good citizens.
Political economy requires farther expansion in order to include all the elements of this great social problem.
It is a true doctrine that demand and supply regulate the price of all things, labour included. But this doctrine presupposes that there is a possibility of the supply coming to the demand; e.g. whatever demand there was for cotton in Lancashire and whatever supply there was of it in America would matter little to the Lancashire manufacturers, if there were no ships or other agencies whereby the supply could encounter the demand. In the same way, whatever amount of labour may be available and whatever demand for labour there may be, this would matter little if there were no means of bringing them together. At the present time there is an agency which brings cotton and cotton mills, separated by half the globe, into immediate relation; but there is no agency whereby labour and the demand or means of labour can be brought together.
This is simply done by chance at present, and both labourer and employer suffer.
Political economy does not say, let madmen run about the streets and pick up their living as they can. But it does say—and it takes for granted in spite of every day's cruel experience—that all human beings having any producing power have also the power of finding work, if they choose.
Now no one can ever really have seen much among the poor, especially in workhouses, without seeing that the faculty of finding work is quite a peculiar one, or the result of education.
The great mass of workmen are perfectly incapable, if work fails them, of forming any reasonable scheme for going to find it elsewhere or in other wise; and starvation will not teach geography.
The industrious widow left with children, for instance, cannot go out to find work, and if work comes to her, it is a welcome accident.
A man may certainly go out to find work, but whether he gets it or not depends exclusively upon his previous training in the habit of obtaining work. And how is he to obtain the previous training? Our laws of settlement were actually devised upon the express principle of discouraging a man from changing his residence.
Also, instead of presenting work as the greatest blessing of man, it is proposed by the law as a punishment, a penalty, a grievance.
St. Paul's opinion, that a man must work to eat, is so clear that one would think it was also clear, for people who read the New Testament, that not giving money but helping men to work, to exercise their producing power, who have not the gift, natural or acquired, to do so unaided, is the charity which, above all, is preached there. When Christ says, 'The poor ye have
