Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/8

498 executive arrangements of paid officers and means of providing and superintending work for meeting promptly, extraordinary as well as ordinary, destitution, which might be gained at a reduced expense, if they were made, as they ought to be, on the scale of the whole city, including its suburbs. I do not mean to say that such extraordinary destitution as has occurred in the cotton districts may be met without extraneous administrative or other aid; but our report under the Commission of Inquiry pointed out town drainage works and other such rude works for the employment of the adult able-bodied, as is now being resorted to with success: and I do mean to say, and experienced paid executive officers would agree with me, that on the due application of the principles therein laid down, such work might have been in full operation more than a year ago throughout all the districts, and that a large amount of demoralisation amongst the labourers might have been saved, and a great deal of severe pressure upon the smaller ratepayers averted, and far less extraneous charitable assistance needed to get over the crisis. I always contemplated that responsibility for the initiation as well as the execution of executive measures should mainly attach to those on whom only it can be charged—namely, the permanent paid officers, locally appointed and supervised; and not on changing, unpaid, and comparatively ill-informed officers, as respects whom any real responsibility for any ill they may do, even in the promotion of their sinister interests, is delusive. The system of entire or in-door relief, as laid down, impedes the action of such sinister interests as have been extensively prevalent during the late crisis in preventing immediate reductions of the masses or congestions of the unemployed, by emigration or by migration, or by changes of employment; it would also have prevented much abusive relief by the payment of rates in aid of labour which has been resorted to by employers who act as guardians, or by guardians who have acted in their supposed, but mistaken, class interests at the expense of other classes of ratepayers, shopkeepers, and others who derive no immediate benefit, if any, from the protected trade. It would take much time to describe the waste, the suffering, the demoralisation, and the permanent burdens which have been imposed on the ratepayers, which the combination of means and consolidated local administrative machinery originally contemplated would have prevented. In many urban districts, as in the metropolis, the profitable labour is given, in some wealthy sub-districts, without any contribution towards the relief of the casualties of destitution contingent on that labour, whilst the entire chargeability for them is thrown upon other and poor sub-districts, or places which the labourers inhabit, and which derive the least benefit from their industry. On the occasion of epidemic visitations, the hospital accommodation in the poorest part of a large town is overcharged,