THE MANUFACTURE OF PAUPERS.
WE intend next Saturday to publish the first of a series of eight articles dealing with the manu- facture of paupers by the State and public institutions. Statistics show that the trade and commerce of the country have during the last few years been in a sound and healthy state. At the present moment, indeed, our material prosperity is probably at the highest point it has ever reached. Last year was a record as regards exports and imports, and this year promises to beat even that record. Yet during the last three years the unemployed have become—or are, at any rate, threatening to become—a permanent feature of our national life. At the same time, the air is full of all sorts of schemes and proposals for increasing State-aid to the poor. In our belief, these undesirable phenomena are due to the fact that the nation has of late years taken the wrong path in the matter of poor relief. We have been deliberately manufacturing paupers. The unemployed, for example, are not a natural but largely an artificial product. They have been called into existence by our unwise policy. It is our intention to show how in various ways the State is engaged in their manufacture, and how, if we do not stay our hand, we shall sap the strength of the nation, and produce for future generations a race of paupers. We were doing that under the old Poor Law ; but happily, when we reached the edge of the precipice in 1834, we drew back and adopted a wiser system. We are now tending to forget our former wisdom, and are again in sight of the abyss. It is our desire, if we can, to make the British public understand what is going on, to realise that they are responsible, and so to get them to stop the pauperisation Of the nation. We want to say to them, in the words of Lodovico to Iago :—
" Look on the tragic loading of this bed; This is thy work."
The first article in our series will deal with the schemes now on foot for beginning the pauperisation of the nation even in the schools by the universal feeding of school- children. Other articles will deal with the manufacture of paupers actually going on, or proposed, by means of indiscriminate out-relief, by old-age pensions, by the injudicious relief often afforded by hospitals, by shelters and refuges, by the increasing attractiveness of workhouses and other Poor Law institutions, and by the unwise treat- ment which we accord to the unemployed. Finally, we shall attempt to show by reference to the history of the old Poor Law how in the past we manufactured paupers under very much the same conditions as we are now manu- facturing them, or proposing to manufacture them, and how the only remedy was found to consist in closing the factory.
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