Page:Local taxation and poor law administration in great cities.djvu/16

12 hand when attention was drawn to the case, for the nurse had a number of water cushions in her room, and the doctors ought to have noticed the shocking condition of their patient. Unfortunately in poor-houses neglect is too general, and we want a thoroughly good inspection to stir us all up to our duties."

Under our present no-system,—for it is no system, whatever we may call it,—neglect is easy, tempting, and general. Good management requires hard, steady work, and requires, moreover, men of experience and training, and experience and training are rarely to be found in our parochial officers, although there certainly are some exceptions, because there is no system by which this training is provided, and no adequate promotion to stimulate to improvement. They are rarely to be found in our Guardians, because, however heartily they may throw themselves into their work at first, they are very apt to become weary and tired of it just when they are really beginning to understand the nature of their duties. The consequence, as I have said, is an utter want of uniformity of management. A pauper can move from parish to parish always finding some place where he can live in idleness, spreading in every direction the foul disease of habitual pauperism, continually becoming more proficient in teaching and learning iniquity. Parish after parish makes the same costly experiments and the same costly blunders, unaware of the fact that these experiments and blunders may have been made in adjacent parishes; frequently too the same parish with new opportunities repeats the old blunders. I do not hesitate to say that one-half of the failure of our Poor Law system might be avoided if the Poor Law Board were only in a position to collect, preserve, and redistribute, in a way acceptable to the Guardians, the records of an experience which is daily being gained and lost in the different parishes throughout the kingdom.

I do not wish to weary the House by quoting many extracts, but I must trouble the House with a very few statistics to show how pauperism flourishes under the system I have described. And I would venture to point out that this increase of pauperism is all the more serious because it is contemporaneous with a vast increase in our wealth. As an illustration of the increase in our wealth I will take the gross annual income assessed to Income Tax in the borough districts of Liverpool. This assessment increased from £4,000,252 in 1849 to £6,714,748 in 1859, or 60 per cent.; and again, from £6,714,748 in 1859 it increased to £9,568,878 in