THE CURE OF POVERTY.*
IT is quite refreshing in these days, when every other news- paper writer and almost every politician wearies us with the jargon of Socialism, and tells us that laisser-faire is an iniquitous and exploded doctrine, to find a writer who stands -tip for the individual, and professes faith in the dogmas of self- help and competition. It is still more refreshing when the war is carried into the enemy's camp, and instead of political economy being held up to derision or sent to Saturn, it is Socialism and State interference that are called to the bar, and found guilty on their own confession of high treason to the welfare alike of the individual and of society.
Mr. Mackay has written an able and an entertaining book on a subject which is generally regarded as, and too often made, hopelessly dull. It is well worth the reading of any one who does not wish to accept the fashionable shibboleth merely because it is fashionable, and does wish to test and try it and think it out. Mr. Ma.ckay's main point is that "all the ills we bear," or rather, that the poor bear, are due not to deficiency of Socialism and State interference in the past, but to the excess of it. Particularly he argues that the poverty -of the masses is due, in the first instance, to their divorce from property in land, owing to the interference of the State in the tenure of land ; and secondarily, to the interference of the State with wages, Trade-Unionism, and poor-relief, whereby they have been divorced from all property, and the self-reliant and prudential instincts which property gives. He sees a double evolution going on,—on the one hand, the con- tinual progress of the propertied classes by the survival of the fittest; on the other, the stationary character of the bulk of the unpropertied classes, and an actual degradation of a large portion of them by the encouragement of the unfittest given by the badness and the bad administration of the Land Laws, the Combination Laws, and, above all, the Poor-Law.
He seeks to prove this by a historical sketch mainly founded
on Professor Thorold Rogers's History of Agricultural Prices and Work and Wages, and Maine's and Seebohm's Village Communities. Feudalism, he points out, was merely a species -of Socialism, which regarded the social organism from the point of view of a fighting organism ; while the concurrent ecclesiastical organisation was another species of Socialism, which regarded the social organism from the point of view of a praying and almsgiving being. Both alike were, he thinks equally prejudicial to the poor man,—the former, because it tied him to the soil as a serf, tied his user of the soil down to a customary tillage of common fields, and, after the Black Death, tied him down to a fixed standard of wages and standard of living ; while the latter depressed him still further by a system of indiscriminate doles and lavish almsgiving, besides erecting poverty into a positive virtue.
On the whole, this historical sketch has much to support it.
But it is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Mackay, in following Maine's theory of a degradation of the manor under the feudal system from a self-governing community of freemen to a system of serfs under a lord, has not put the cart before the horse. "The odd thing is that he seems to regard Mr. Seebohm's English Village Community as written in support of Maine's view, whereas it is directed to establish precisely the opposite theory, —viz., that the history of the feudal manor, instead of being a history of degradation, is a history of elevation and evolution. Mr. Seebohm's argument is that the manor first appears as the household of a lord with slaves, and that the freeholders, the villeins, the serfs, the copyholders, the leaseholders of a manor are successive developments of these slaves by virtue of individual efforts gaining the force, first of custom, and then of law. The lawyers used to scoff at Mr. Seebohm's theory, because, according to them, a manor implied a court—" No court, no manor "—and a court im- plied freehold suitors. It seemed probable to any one who was not a mere lawyer that this theory of a manor must have been a later development, and it was certainly in contradic- tion to very important facts first brought together by Mr. 'Seebohm. Later legal researches have confirmed, not the lawyers, but Mr. Seebohm ; and Mr. Maitland, in his excellent volume for the Selden Society on the Early Manorial Rolls, has shown strong reason to suppose that the manor existed before the court, and that the maxim of "No court, no manor," -was a legal formula of modern date, invented by lawyers ignorant of history.
• The English Poor. By T. Mackay. London : John Murray. It is the more curious that Mr. Mackay has not seen this, as it really strengthens his argument. For if the history of the feudal manor is a history of elevation, it is a history of the development of the individual and individual effort, until by the Statute of Quia emptores, and later by the Statute of Labourers, the State interfered and endeavoured, happily in vain, to crystallise the manor, and fix the position of the labourer as a serf of a lord. After the Reformation the State endeavoured with more fatal effect to crystallise the parish, and, by the operation of the Poor- Law and the Law of Settlement, reduced the labourer to the position of a serf of the commune. The best part of Mr. Mackay's book, to our thinking, is that devoted to the Poor- Law, and especially that part of it directed against outdoor relief. Our present Guardians have largely forgotten the crisis and the causes which led to the condemnation of outdoor relief and the Poor-Law Act of 1834, and, misled by false and short- sighted notions of humanity and economy, have reverted largely to outdoor relief. The consequence is, that pauperisation is incessantly going on, and the attempt to lessen the rates by it is incessantly raising them. It is deplorable to learn that the Unions of Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, and Bingham, which were in 1834 pioneers and examples of the good effect of restricting outdoor relief, have now lapsed into laxity. But the statistics given by Mr. Mackay as to the working of strictness in Whitechapel, as a sample of an urban Union, and in Bradfield, Berks., as a sample of a rural Union, ought to be circulated in every Union in the country. In 1870, in Whitechapel, the total number of indoor paupers was 1,419; of outdoor paupers, 5,339. The next year, strict administration was introduced. In 1875, the numbers were reduced to 1,170 indoors, and 346 out of doors; in 1888, the numbers were 1,229 indoors, and 63 out of doors, though, of course, the population had largely increased. The most remarkable fact of all is, that in 1888 the whole cost of outdoor relief for a year was less than the cost of a single week in 1870. So, too, in the Bradfield Union. In 1871, there were 999 indoor and 259 outdoor paupers, or 1,258 in all, at a cost of a rate of 2s. Oid. in the pound. Strictness was applied. By 1876, the indoor paupers were reduced to 482, the outdoor to 154, the rate to is. 0d. in the pound. By 1888, the indoor paupers fell to 42, the outdoor to 100, the rate to 51d. in the pound ; and yet the population had slightly increased. Contrast this with the "profligate administration" of the City of London, which, in spite of its hundreds of thousands a year of charities, has made 62 paupers to every 1,000 people, against 16 per 1,000 in the poor parish of Whitechapel.
We confess we are unable to follow Mr. Mackay into the extremity of his anti-Socialism, which leads him to "hazard in a note" the doctrine that the State should enforce no contract; which would entail either the abolition of commerce which is founded on credit and the right to enforce contracts, or simply the adoption of private instead of public arbitration boards. But any one does good service to-day who shows the vice of excessive Socialism, and agitates against outdoor poor-relief.
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