Page:Farm labourers, their friendly societies, and the poor law.djvu/34

 applicants belonging to approved friendly societies where the sickness pay is in their opinion insufficient.

(2) The refusal of relief, other than the house, to applicants being members of sharing-out or other clubs not deserving of confidence.

(3) Strict treatment of able-bodied male paupers of indifferent or bad character; thus making a difference between them and able-bodied paupers whose want resulted from their misfortune and not from their fault.

(4) That able-bodied married paupers of the latter class, and aged and infirm married paupers, be allowed to live in conformity with the provision that husband and wife shall dwell together till death them do part.

(5) All occupiers of houses to pay rates on the rateable value. No composition in lieu thereof to be permitted.

There was a fair probability of indirectly gaining the last-named alteration in the extension of the franchise; but the session of 1869 witnessed an alteration which, in its bearing on the occupiers of small tenements, tends to perpetuate the pernicious view commonly taken by them of the poor-rate, and imposition by farming their rates. An enlargement of the powers of the Registrar of Friendly Societies, and certain alterations in the law relating to friendly societies, are needed, in order to secure the annual audit of accounts, and the periodical valuation of the societies. Such information should then be tabulated in the Registrar's reports, and thus be available to the guardians. But they would need no help from the Registrar in dealing with applicants belonging to uncertified farm labourers' benefit clubs of the common type until their managers began to improve them.

Such, then, is the nature of the work, so far as the Poor Law is concerned, and the alterations which appear to be necessary if the degradation of our rural poor is to be arrested, and their natural efforts for independence to be stimulated and developed. We would destroy or alter nothing in the Poor Law, or its administration, which is good and serviceable, but would amend it in those points in which it is working mischief to the labouring classes and loss and injury to the community.

The second part of this reform, which should on no account be postponed till the regulations for poor-relief are amended, is that which would develope and consolidate a system as complete and distinct in itself as that of the Poor Law, of the insurances of the wage-paid classes who dwell within the verge of pauperism.

While, on the one hand, labourers, whether agricultural, mining, or manufacturing, should be discouraged as much as