undertaken by the State under the new scheme is computed to be £750,000,000. That is the actuarial liability. Meanwhile, there are annual payments to be met. The cost to the State will start at £4,000,000 a year. By the tenth year it will have increased to £15,000,000; by the twentieth to £25,000,000; by the thirtyfifth it will have declined to £21,000,000. But, meanwhile, the cost of the non-contributory pensions will, as already indicated, be constantly rising. Consequently, thirty-five years hence the combined cost will amount to no less than £70,000,000 a year. The only consoling consideration is that, if peace is maintained, the cost of war pensions will correspondingly decline: but this only means that the country will for all time be responsible for pension charges in the neighbourhood of £90,000,000 a year.

And yet we shall not (such is the assumption) have got rid of pauperism, nor be quit of the charge which its survival will impose.

The prospect is undeniably grim, and it is the main submission of this article that, before any change in the administration of the poor law is carried out, the whole subject should be exhaustively reviewed by a Royal Commission. It will doubtless be objected that this means delay and that the facts are already known. The facts are known; but have they ever been envisaged in their integrity? Since the last comprehensive investigation (1906-9), the whole situation has undergone complete transformation. Even since the Report of the Maclean Committee on the Transfer of Functions of Poor Law Authorities (1918) much has happened-notably the initiation of the Contributory Pensions scheme. would seem, therefore, to be imperative that before any large reform is undertaken the situation should be carefully reviewed as a whole.

It

Not that drastic reforms are not urgently called for. There is urgent need, in the first place, of complete information as to the recipients of relief to which the State or local authorities in any degree contribute. The ideal remedy for the overlapping of various forms of public assistance would seem to be a single register. If the cost of keeping such a register be prohibitive, we might at least adopt the modest suggestions of the Betterton Inter-Departmental Committee on Public Assistance (xiii and xiv, p. 67), that public authorities, central and local, should encourage the formation, by voluntary effort, of local Councils of Social

Service, and should, wherever possible, recognize the officer-incharge of a voluntary local register of assistance and should communicate to him, upon request, details of grants made by the public authorities in particular cases. Secondly, there ought to be, and even as things are there might be, much closer co-operation between the central authorities which control public assistance and the local authorities which administer it. Even more important is it that in every locality there should be close and continuous cooperation between the several bodies which administer the various kinds of assistance, even if it should not be immediately practicable to concentrate all the functions in a single body. On this point the Report of the Maclean Committee (1918) was emphatic :

There are at this moment a large number of different bodies giving various forms of public assistance out of rates and taxes, with very inexact delimitations of the persons eligible. Many of these bodies deal on different lines and for different reasons with members of the same family. There are, for instance, seven different public authorities giving money in the house, leaving out of account the exceptional cases of money payments by the education and health authorities. All these are found contributing towards maintenance in various forms— institutional or other. At least six are providing various forms of medical treatment (pp. 3, 4).

The overlapping of authorities and the duplication of services are indeed notorious if not scandalous. They sometimes induce actual fraud on the part of the recipient. A person was convicted at the Clerkenwell Police Court on July 15, 1923, and was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for obtaining from the Borough Council milk to the value of £1 13s. 6d. It was found that the defendant was receiving £2 5s. 2d. treatment allowance from the Pensions Ministry, £1 2s. od. unemployment benefit, £2 5s. od. from the British Red Cross, 18s. 4d. pension, and 12s. Id. from the Guardians. Such a case may be extreme, but others almost equally grotesque have been cited, and for one that is discovered, how many remain undetected? A single register would lead to immediate detection: even the increased use of local voluntary registers of mutual assistance would tend to prevent overlapping and to discourage dishonesty.

The evil has arisen, it is important to observe, from two different sources on the one hand from statutory duplication of services; and on the other from defects of administration. For the former a piecemeal legislation is responsible. The several

assistance services have developed, over a long period of time, on independent lines and, what is more serious, on straight lines which never meet. For this evil nothing but consolidating legislation can provide a remedy, and legislation must begin with the Poor Law. For, as the Betterton Committee (p. 47) points

out :—

While specialized services have encroached upon the original field of the Poor Law in all directions, the Poor Law still retains a particular position among the public services as the residuary legatee of all forms of want. . . . It is not only being constantly called upon to supplement the provision made within the strict statutory limits of specialized schemes and to assume responsibility for many persons who are altogether outside the scope of the specialized schemes or who have temporarily exhausted their rights under such schemes, but it continues to provide, especially in the field of medical benefit, many services provided concurrently under specialized schemes.

All this is statutory-the outcome of piecemeal legislation. There is also the overlapping which is due to the failure of administrative co-ordination, which might certainly be reduced if not eliminated by the methods indicated above. The chaos of areas and collision of jurisdictions demand on the contrary statutory amendment. Such amendment must be consolidatory; it must, therefore, be preceded by comprehensive investigation. That investigation must necessarily take account not merely, or even mainly, of the poor relief administered by the Guardians, but of that spate of public benevolence which is threatening to overflow the banks of an ever-broadening stream, and to inundate large districts inhabited by a population which has hitherto believed in the old-fashioned virtues of self-help, independence, and disdain of charity.

The proposals of reform adumbrated by the Ministry of Health would seem to rest fundamentally upon the principles enunciated by Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mr. George Lansbury and others in the Minority Report of 1909. The dominating motive of that Report was to erase all distinction between the dependent and the independent poor. It proposed to break up the Poor Law and to encourage all classes of the population to look to the State for assistance in all the contingencies incidental to human life for redress of all the ills which flesh is heir to. In this connection it is not without significance that the Circular (658) sent out to Boards of Guardians in January last by the Ministry

of Health emphasises the fact that "the principle of Poor Law reform, involving the transfer of the powers and duties of Guardians to other local authorities, has been endorsed by all political parties and accepted by governments and parties over a period of years."

Then follows a sentence which is calculated to make a good many members of the present House of Commons rub their eyes and endeavour to refresh their memories. "No later than May last the principle was endorsed in the present Parliament without a division.” The statement is technically unimpeachable; but a reference to Hansard (May 27, 1925) reveals the fact that the assent to this principle was given on a motion proposed on a private members' night in a very thin house by Mr. Sidney Webb. A Conservative amendment which had been placed on the paper was not moved, doubtless for reasons which will be appreciated by those who are familiar with parliamentary procedure and the habits of the House of Commons. Apart altogether from the merits of the principle thus solemnly affirmed, is it quite ingenuous to attempt to impress Boards of Guardians by the semblance of unanimity achieved under such circumstances?

That the present situation is highly unsatisfactory, not to say gravely disquieting, has been admitted, nay emphasized, in preceding paragraphs. Will it be improved by the abolition of an ad hoc authority, which possesses at any rate, in the rural districts a knowledge of the circumstances of the beneficiaries, and is directly interested in economy? Will it be improved by largely extending the area of administration; by imposing additional duties and fresh responsibilities upon elected Councils, already overburdened, with the inevitable result of throwing the work more and more exclusively into the hands of officials? Above all, will it be improved by blurring the wholesome and time-honoured distinction between pauperism and poverty, by altering familiar designations-in brief, by an endeavour to eradicate the "taint" of pauperism by making it universal ?

This article must not, however, end on a note of pessimism which is dissonant with the writer's own convictions. Temptation to pessimism may be averted by one or two considerations. The first is the remarkable development, despite all superficial evidence to the contrary, of a habit of thrift among the poorer classes of our people. Mr. Snowden, when he was Chancellor of the

Exchequer, confessed that he was staggered by the magnitude of the contributions which are made by the working people of this country in one form or another to provide for what we colloquially call a rainy day" (Hansard, February 20, 1924). Acting on Mr. Snowden's hint, I have myself made rather elaborate investigations, and have reached the still more "staggering" conclusion that the invested capital of the relatively poorer classes amounts in the aggregate to not less than £2,500,000,000.* Those figures, published some months ago, have not to my knowledge been challenged, and it will be agreed that, if they are even approximately correct, they afford ground for satisfaction and for hopefulness.

Nor should it be forgotten that, acute as the present crisis unquestionably is, we had to confront an almost precisely parallel crisis about a century ago, a crisis which like that in which we are now involved followed immediately upon the conclusion of a great European war. The earlier crisis was, in some respects, the worse in that it was marked by an epidemic of crime and disorder, and by an amount and degree of suffering among the poor, such as the present generation has happily escaped. From the crisis which followed Waterloo, the country emerged, but not until a reformed House of Commons had drastically amended the Poor Law. The Act of 1834, in Mr. Gladstone's judgment," rescued the English peasantry from total loss of their independence.”

Their independence is again menaced, more subtly than in the earlier period, by the multiplication and overlapping of agencies, which, severally benevolent in intention, are, in the aggregate, calculated to undermine independence and weaken character. Few people would now have the courage to advocate a precise repetition of the prescription which, as we have seen, proved so efficacious after 1834. Remedies so drastic would not be tolerated by the present softer and more sentimental generation, nor would an enlarged electorate permit their application. Yet, on the admission of most people who have given serious thought to the matter, the existing system is socially mischievous, politically dangerous, and in a financial sense well-nigh intolerable. It is the product of a protracted period of piecemeal legislation

*For the detailed figures substantiating this conclusion c.f. an article by the present writer in The Fortnightly Review for September, 1926.