doctored in places called workhouses, &c. &c. And then you subscribe to private charities to take your paupers out of the power of the Poor Law. If you do the one, why do you do the other? Would it not be cheaper to see that the two work in the same direction? We cannot understand such a principle of administration.'
Has then the future Poor Law reform, which we are so anxiously hoping for, nothing to do but to economise?
It has to do this certainly, but only as a means to a higher economy.
The private enterprises, referred to above, showed a truer economy than that recommended theoretically by the greatest political economists.
Has then private charity nothing to do but to hold its hand?
If the word 'charity' is but named, political economists cry out that 'all charity is pauperising.'
The answer is: if it is pauperising, it is not charity.
In the Times of January 25, occurs as follows:
'It has been officially reported that the resident population of Great Britain is increased by 240,000 persons annually, and it is calculated that these new-comers would require for their subsistence in bread alone, the crops of 50,000 acres of land under skilful tillage.'
Now it is clear that these 240,000 people must be fed. It is also clear that an area of ground of about ten miles long by eight miles broad, must be put under cultivation, to feed them with bread alone. Is it not also clear that all of them who cannot be profitably employed on productive industry, for which other people cultivating ground would be content to exchange part of their surplus produce, ought to be put to cultivating for themselves?—or that, if this is not done, they must live on other people's labour? And this is really the only resource provided at present either by our legislature—or, except in mere driblets, by our private charity.
One would think a very obvious permanent arrangement in such a country as England, with such a limitless extent of colonial lands, would be to prepare areas for colonisation—to put up, at a cost to be repaid by the colonists, some kind of shelter—to select the colonists—and to brigade them and send them out to the land, seeing we cannot bring the land to them. But in England, we don't colonise—we only emigrate. And people left to themselves to learn how to emigrate successfully often die in the process. In the Roman sense of colonisation, or even in the French sense, we do nothing.
Do the ratepayers ever think that the seven millions of annual poor rate would in one single year place every recipient of Poor Law relief, old and young, man, woman and child, on the shores of America?—would pay all expenses, and leave them one or two pounds their pockets to begin the world with?
Suppose that to this sum were added the amount squandered on the same class, by private (so-called) charity in one single year, would it not in all probability be sufficient to pay the outfit of every one of these poor people on the land?
Of course it is not intended that aged, sick, and infirm should be dealt with in this way. But the fact ought to make us all think whether we cannot carry our rates and our charity to a better market than we have been in the habit of doing—to think, not that the remedy is to be sought in this exact way, but whether the annual rate is not to a large extent equivalent to an annual capital, which, once spent, would extinguish the rate altogether.
Supposing it were a more usual
