Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/797

Rh I maintain that, if our legislators are to act rationally, they will as far as possible imitate the agricultural chemist. The idea, for instance, of obliging, or even allowing, all the boroughs in the kingdom simultaneously to adopt the Gothenburg plan, would be ridiculous and irrational. The cost and confusion which would arise from a sudden general trial must be very great; many years would elapse before the result was apparent. And that result would not be so clear as if the trial were restricted to some half a dozen towns. In the mean time it would be far better that other boroughs should be trying other experiments, giving us many strings to our bow, while some towns would actually do best for the country by going on as nearly as possible in their present course. Specific and differentiated experience is what we need, before making any further important change in the drink-trade.

Not only is this the rational method of procedure, but it is practically the method to which we owe all the more successful legislative and administrative reforms of later years. Consider the Poor Law question. During the eighteenth century. Parliament made two or three leaps in the dark, by enacting laws such as Gilbert's Act, and very nearly ruined the kingdom by them. The great Poor Law Commission commenced its operations in the soundest way by collecting all available information about the treatment of the poor, whether at home or abroad. But, what is more to the point, since the new Poor Law was passed in 1834, the partially free action of Boards of Guardians, under the supervision of the Poor Law Commission and the Poor Law Board, has afforded a long series of experimental results. The reports of Mr. Edwin Chadwick and the late Sir George Shaw Lefevre are probably the best models of the true process of administrative reform to be anywhere found. In more recent years several very important experiments have been tried by different Boards of Guardians, such as the boarding out of pauper children, the suppression of vagrancy by the provision of separate vagrant cells and the hard-labor test, and the cutting down of outdoor relief. If the total abolition of outdoor relief is ever to be tried, it must be tried on the small scale first; it would be a far too severe and dangerous measure to force upon the whole country at a single blow. Much attention has lately been drawn to the so-called "Poor-Law Experiment at Elberfeld," which was carefully described by the Rev. W. Walter Edwards, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" for July, 1878, bearing that precise title.

Even when an act of Parliament is passed in general terms applying to the whole kingdom at once, it by no means follows that it will be equally put into operation everywhere. The discretion necessarily allowed to magistrates and other authorities often gives ample scope for instructive experiments. Some years since the Howard Association called attention to what they expressly called "The Luton Experiment," consisting in the extraordinary success with which the