discipline, by which alone character is made. We had two hundred and thirty years of the old Poor Law, under which State relief was carried to its utmost limits, and at the end of it the ruin of the poor and of the country was nearly complete. The problem of pauperism is, I think, very little understood, and its magnitude insufficiently recognised. It is not a question of people being "deserving or undeserving." Many a pauper is neither vicious nor criminal, whilst many who are both vicious and criminal are not paupers. The question is one which lies deep in human nature. There are pauper rich as well as pauper poor. Pauperism means the deadening of effort, ambition, self-respect, and self-reliance, following on the relaxation of the law of self-preservation. As an old writer says, "Men have nothing to stir them to labour but their wants, which it is wisdom to relieve but folly to cure." The question is an economic one, the corollary of the weakness of average human nature, from which the poor are no more exempt than the rich. It is because it is the uniform experience both in this and other countries that State relief saps the foundations of human effort that many of us regard its extension, in spite of all past history, with the utmost apprehension.
The next great principle is that State relief is certain eventually to diminish and even to dry up the springs of private charity, and that we must make our election between them. It is sufficiently obvious that people will not do that of their own accord for which they are already taxed. The Unemployed Workmen Act was based upon the voluntary principle; already voluntary subscriptions, in London at least, have dwindled and almost disappeared, and it is plain that if the Act is to be continued the cost must fall entirely on the rates and the Imperial Exchequer. The same will probably take place with regard to the Provision of Meals Act. The burden of the rates is often made the reason for refusal to subscribe to a charity. In France, at the time of the French Revolution and later, charity was proscribed by
