Page:The Slippery Slope.djvu/56

 It was finally adopted by the Commission of 1834, and remains the underlying principle of the English Poor Law. The principle more fully stated is as follows, viz., that, whereas nature ordains that a man must either support himself or starve, no civilised community can, for its own sake and credit, allow such an extremity of hardship. On the contrary, all will agree that the necessaries of life must be provided for every one who is in need of them ; but that they must, so far as the State is concerned, be given upon terms, and the terms hitherto accepted as the basis of our Poor Law have been the conditions laid down by the Commission of 1834. There must be devised somehow an element of deterrence in public relief, and the Poor Law must be, as the Commissioners put it, "centrifugal, not centripetal." We had 200 years of a centripetal Poor Law, with results which may be summed up in a sentence, "ruin to the poor, ruin to the country." Another point of some importance which stands out from a study of these pamphlets is that, for almost 200 years, every writer except Daniel Defoe, and perhaps Sir F. Eden, seems to have believed, in spite of constant failure, in the possibility of making artificial work. The belief in its possibility is apparently as strong as ever at the present moment. All the best wits of nearly three centuries have applied their minds to the problem, but no one hitherto has been able to supply a solution. The authors of the Unemployed Workmen's Act are in no better plight. All the old difficulties are recurring ; all the old fallacies are being put forward as new ideas ; many of the old failures are being renewed under the guise of "experiments," and all the old arguments on either side repeated almost ad nauseam. After the lapse of yet another century, we may once more recall the words of Sir F. Eden, "that it will at least