that it outstripped all financial expedients. The lesson of the experiment is the same as that of the poor-law catastrophe before 1834; only, instead of the able-bodied poor of another age, infants were made the object of a compassionate but undiscerning philanthropy. With widespread relief there came widespread abandonment of duty and economic bankruptcy. Had the poor-rates instead of charitable relief been used in the same way, the moral injury would have been as great, but the annual draft from the rates would have concealed the moral and postponed the economic disaster. To amend the evil, changes were made by which the relation between child and mother was kept alive, and a personal application on her part was required; the character of the mother and her circumstances were investigated, and assistance was only given when it would be “the means of replacing the mother in the course of virtue and the way of an honest livelihood.” General reforms were also made, especially through the instrumentality of Jonas Hanway, to check infant mortality, and metropolitan parishes were required to provide for their children outside London. A kindred movement led to the establishment of penitentiaries (1758), of lock hospitals and lying-in hospitals (1749–1752).
In Queen Anne’s reign there was a new educational movement, “the charity school”—“to teach poor children the alphabet and the principles of religion,” followed by the Sunday-school movement (1780), and about the same time (1788) by “the school of industry”—to employ children and teach them to be industrious. In 1844 the Ragged School Union was established, and until the Education Act of 1870 continued its voluntary educational work. As an outcome of these movements, through the efforts of Miss Mary Carpenter and many others, in 1854–1855 industrial and reformatory schools were established, to prevent crime and reform child criminals. The orphanage movement, beginning in 1758, when the Orphan Working Home was established, has been continued to the present day on a vastly extended scale. In 1772 a society for the discharge of persons imprisoned for small debts was established, and in 1773 Howard began his prison reforms. This raised the standard of work in institutional charities generally. After the civil wars the old hospital foundations of St Bartholomew and St Thomas, municipalized by Edward VI., became endowed charities partly supported by voluntary contributions. The same fate befell Christ’s Hospital, in connexion with which the voting system, the admission of candidates by the vote of the whole body of subscribers—that peculiarly English invention—first makes its appearance.
A new interest in hospitals sprang up at the end of the 17th century. St Thomas’s was rebuilt (1693) and St Bartholomew’s (1739); Guy’s was founded in 1724, and on the system of free “letters” obtainable in exchange for donations, voluntary hospitals and infirmaries were established in London (1733 and later) and in most of the large towns. Towards the end of the 18th century the dispensary movement was developed—a system of local dispensaries with fairly definite districts and home visiting, a substitute for attendance at a hospital, where “hospital fever” was dreaded, and an alternative to what was then a very ill-administered system of poor-law medical relief. After 1840 the provident dispensary was introduced, in order that the patients by small contributions in the time of health might provide for illness without having to meet large doctors’ bills, and the doctor might receive some sufficient remuneration for his attendance on poor patients. This movement was largely extended after 1860. Three hospital funds for collecting contributions for hospitals and making them grants, a movement that originated in Birmingham in 1859, were established in London in 1873 and 1897.
Since 1868 the poor-law medical system of Great Britain has been immensely improved and extended, while at the same time the number of persons in receipt of free medical relief in most of the large towns has greatly increased. The following figures refer to London: at hospitals, 97 in number, in-patients (1904) during the year, 118,536; out-patients and casualty cases, 1,858,800; patients at free, part-pay, or provident dispensaries, about 280,000; orders issued for attendance at poor-law dispensaries and at home, 114,158. The number of beds in poor-law infirmaries (1904) was 16,976. There are in London 12 general hospitals with, 18 without, medical schools, and 67 special hospitals. Thus the population in receipt of public and voluntary medical relief is very large, indeed altogether excessive.
Each religious movement has brought with it its several charities. The Society of Friends, the Wesleyans, the Baptists have large charities. With the extension of the High Church movement there have been established many sisterhoods which support penitentiaries, convalescent homes and hospitals, schools, missions, &c.
The magnitude of this accumulating provision of charitable relief is evident, though it cannot be summed up in any single total.
At the beginning of the 19th century anti-mendicity societies were established; and later, about 1869, in England and Scotland a movement began for the organization of charitable relief, in connexion with which there are now societies and committees in most of the larger towns in Great Britain, in the colonies, and in the United States of America. More recently the movement for the establishment of settlements in poor districts, initiated by Canon Barnett at Toynbee Hall—“to educate citizens in the knowledge of one another, and to provide them with teaching and recreation”—has spread to many towns in England and America.
These notes of charitable movements suggest an altogether new development of thought. On behalf of the charity school of Queen Anne’s time were preached very formal sermons, which showed but little sympathy with child life. After the first half of the century a new humanismProgress
of thought
in 18th
and 19th
centuries. with which we connect the name of Rousseau, slowly superseded this formal beneficence. Rousseau made the world open its eyes and see nature in the child, the family and the community. He analysed social life, intent on explaining it and discovering on what its well-being depended; and he stimulated that desire to meet definite social needs which is apparent in the charities of the century. Little as it may appear to be so at first sight, it was a period of charitable reformation. Law revised the religious conception of charity, though he was himself so strangely devoid of social instinct that, like some of his successors, he linked the utmost earnestness in belief to that form of almsgiving which most effectually fosters beggardom. Howard introduced the era of inspection, the ardent apostle of a new social sagacity; and Bentham, no less sagacious, propounded opinions, plans and suggestions which, perhaps it may be said, in due course moulded the principles and methods of the poor-law of 1834. In the broader sense the turn of thought is religious, for while usually stress is laid on the religious scepticism of the century, the deeper, fervent, conscientious and evangelical charity in which Nonconformists, and especially “the Friends,” took so large a part, is often forgotten. Sometimes, indeed, as often happens now, the feeling of charity passed into the merest sentimentality. This is evident, for instance, from so ill-considered a measure as Pitt’s Bill for the relief of the poor. On the other hand, during the 18th century the poor-law was the object of constant criticism, though so long as the labour statutes and the old law of settlement were in force, and the relief of the labouring population as state “poor” prevailed, it was impossible to reform it. Indeed, the criticism itself was generally vitiated by a tacit acceptance of “the poor” as a class, a permanent and irrevocable charge on the funds of the community; and at the end of the 18th century, when the labour statutes were abrogated, but the conditions under which poor relief was administered remained the same, serfdom in its later stage, the serfdom of the poor-law, asserted itself in its extremest form in times of dearth and difficulty during the Napoleonic War. In 1802–1803 it was calculated (Marshall’s Digest) that 28% of the population were in receipt of permanent or occasional relief. Those in receipt of the former numbered 734,817, including children—so real had this serfdom of the poor become.
In 1832 the expenditure on pauperism in England and Wales was £7,036,968. In the early years of the 19th century the mendicity societies, established in some of the larger towns, were a sign of the general discontent with existing methods of administration. The Society for Bettering the Condition of the
