amount from ten millions to thirty millions a year are in everybody's mouths.[1] In fact the possibilities of State action are regarded as almost unlimited. Apart from questions directed towards the actual relief of the poor, there are all sorts of other proposals in the air. The State is to house the poor, and, in its attempts to do so, finds itself upon the horns of a dilemma. Either it must let at unremunerative and eleemosynary rents, or it must house those who were sufficiently well housed before. It is to buy up and work all sorts of commercial undertakings; it is to pay high wages to those whom it employs, and to supply the consumer—cheap. The municipal debt last year amounted to £270,000,000 or about one-third of the National Debt. The increase over the previous year was £14,000,000, a sufficiently rapid rate of progress.
Of course Poor Law administrators have nothing to do with all this except to remember that their expenditure is only part of a much wider question. The modern idea of the State as an omnipotent charitable agency is quite at variance with that which the older generation were taught and believed in. The matter is one so vital not to the poor alone but to the whole country, of which the daily wage-earners are the basis and foundation, that it affects, possibly more than any other question foreign or domestic, the future of the nation.
We have travelled far from the teachings of the older economists often enunciated, seldom accepted. They believed that the true line of progress was to be found in the adequate payment of labour and in the self-restraint and self-reliance of the industrial classes themselves. They regarded relief by the State with the utmost jealousy because they
- ↑ Note, 1912.—Most of these proposals have now been carried into effect.
