Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/4

 in return for this subsistence, under proper superintendence. They may be set on out-door work, as many of the able-bodied in Lancashire now are, strictly in compliance with the statute of Elizabeth, provided it be under proper superintendence and security that their whole time is occupied in working in return for relief.

Principles of In-door Belief. The workhouse is the most convenient means of providing for fluctuating numbers of applicants, on occasions when they are too few, to make it worth while to provide out-door work or to employ officers to superintend it. The workhouse or poorhouse meets nearly all cases. The poorhouse serves, moreover, as an hospital, as a fever-ward, and an asylum in cases of sickness as well as of ordinary destitution.

Condition of Populations without Compulsory Belief for Destitution. The state of things which prevails in the entire absence of any legal provision for the relief of the destitute is seen in Italy, in Naples, in Sicily, Spain, and other Roman Catholic countries, in voluntary relief by alms, and a sort of voluntary practice of out-door relief without any return of work. Whatever may be the merit in pious intention of relief by alms collected and distributed by ministers of religion, such an administration is always attended by this defect, that it is without means to ensure the funds from fraudulent misapplication, or secure a return of work from the able-bodied, or to enforce the conditions we specified as necessary thereto; in which our colleagues, the excellent late Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the late Bishop of London, Blomfield, fully agreed with us. In the instances of the most abundant distribution of doles, the effects are seen in indolence, filth, squalid misery, vice, and discontent. The impression is created in the popular mind of the existence of an indefinite and inexhaustible fund apart from any sources in the labour of others, of wrong if there be any stint to them—of wrong for which, to the more active depredation, brigandage is a natural and proper means of redress, as a war to obtain a rightful share of wealth, and the means of subsistence without giving any work in return for it.

Uses of a Poor Law System as an adjunct to a Police System. It is a one-sided and narrow view of a legal provision of the nature of the one in question to regard it as a measure simply for the relief of indigence. It has an important aspect, not commonly regarded, as a measure for the prevention of crime, as a measure of police, and of extended penal administration. In this view we contemplated that there should be a comity and concurrent action in England between the indigence relief service with a systematized