out of London to occupy a hut apart from his family and his friends, to do dull work in the fields, to submit to continual training of mind and body, to be deprived even of the excitement of gas-light. The loafer hates, above all things, to be improved, and the farm would be more distasteful to him than the workhouse, where he has at any rate the fun of foiling the master's efforts to make him take his discharge. On the other hand, what honest man would not gladly endure loneliness, dulness, or labour if at the end he could see himself able to earn a living and serve his children. Any man who being out of work refused such an offer would get no sympathy or encouragement from his neighbours of any class. An indirect advantage of a training-farm would indeed be the right direction of a sympathy which is now often given to those who say they would starve rather than go to 'the house.' Such sympathy from members of the steady classes makes many agitations dangerous, and may, if it be not guided, help in the overthrow of beneficial action. The knowledge that in the workhouse education and not punishment was offered would be a guide to sympathy, and at last gain for guardians the support of working people. Another line of argument followed by those who object to the management of the training-farm being under the poor law takes its start from their conception of what is meant by pauperism. If,' they say, 'a man receives relief from the rates he is a pauper, and as a pauper will be shunned by his fellows and refused in the colonies.' Now by the term 'pauper' is meant the cringing creature who schemes to escape work; and the question arises whether it is relief, or the method of its administration, which brings a man down to this condition. Children get their education for nothing or for a nominal fee, working men enter the poor-law infirmary or a hospital during illness, state pensioners take their pensions, sons enjoy what their fathers earned-all these have relief and are not made thereby cringing creatures. On the other hand, the recipients of out-relief, the cadgers who beg for coal-tickets, the habitués of the workhouse, are degraded. All receive relief, but only the latter may truly be described as 'paupers.' Pauperism represents a moral condition resulting not from the acceptance of relief, but, like other conditions, more or less traceable to fifty different causes. The relief offered in the training-farm would aim at exerting an influence which would counteract pauperism; it would not, like outrelief, depending on the chance favour of an official or on the cleverness of an applicant's tale, tempt some to bully and some to cringe, but, offered according to rules capable of being universally understood, it would promote steady action; neither would it, like much indoor relief, be given as if it were wrung out of the ratepayers affording the recipients the demoralising pleasure of being gainers by others' loss, but it would be given with the distinct object of training men to work. No citizen would therefore grudge the expense any more than he grudges the labour spent on education, and no recipient would be any more degraded than is a man who gets his technical teaching at the People's Palace. As a final argument it is said that if guardians employ men on a training-farm the belief will be encouraged that it is the duty of the State to find work for the unemployed. In answer to which it must be repeated that the object of the farm is not to give work but to give training. The guardians do already teach such trades as carpentering, baking, and mat-making: there can hardly be such a distinction between working on the produce of the land and on the land itself as to condemn the latter as dangerous. The Standard, commenting on the proposal, says, 'An experiment for so welldefined a purpose, and conducted strictly on the principle of making all paupers work hard for their living, would be little likely to be confounded with such pernicious establishments as the national workshops of political dreamers.' With every sympathy therefore for the objects of those who dread lest poor-law relief should affect the independence of the people, I submit that the establishment of a training-farm is not open to the objection that it is false to the principle of poor-law reform. Whether the direction of such a farm shall be in official or voluntary hands must be settled simply on practical grounds. For either there is much that may be urged. The guardians have an established position, the command of money, and they do all their work under the public eye. A voluntary association has a certain freedom of action, allows for the play of enthusiasm, and depends for success on public support. The elements which each supply are necessary. In the working of the farm there must be stability and effective control; there must also be individual care and a certain elasticity in management. Ought the direction to be in the hands of a Board of Guardians, which gives stability; or in the hands of an association, which gives elasticity? Clearly stability should come before elasticity. A firm government must be established before changes can be successfully tried, and there is little doubt that guardians would be recognised as the right body to direct a training-farm were it not (1) that the scheme is suspected as a new departure, and (2) that public bodies are in bad repute. If the scheme were an experiment in a totally different direction to any undertaken by guardians, there might be good reason for entrusting it to a body which would commit the State to nothing, and which would die without leaving heirs. As, however, a training-farm is a legitimate development of the industrial training of a model workhouse and of the remedial efforts of an infirmary to help the same class of persons, and as fitfulness of management would be fatal, there is the best reason for entrusting the direction to guardians. Public bodies, though, are in bad repute. The malpractices which VOL. XXIV.-No. 141. 3 F have been lately disclosed, the common talk about the red tape of officialism, the published reports of the vain discussions on Boardsall these things make official management unpopular. Voluntary associations meet in private, but if their reports were published favouritism would be discovered, delays made manifest, and wasted time shown to be the not unfrequent result of a meeting. In addition their action is spasmodic, depending on windfalls, or fitful, depending on the will of some powerful supporter. They as frequently die as live, and the amount of money and energy which is every year sunk by the weak administration, the badly chosen officials, and the follies of voluntary associations would appal even those hardened by tales of expenditure in public offices. It is hard to judge between the effectiveness of official and voluntary bodies. It is everyone's business to abuse a Board; it is no one's business to abuse a charity, and it is the business of every supporter to sing its praises. So the common opinion gets a bias against Boards. If I sum up a somewhat long experience, I would say that the fitfulness and uncertainty of voluntary agencies make them more unfit for directing work than does the somewhat wooden stability of public Boards. I recall with pain the method covering a want of method, the affectation of business forms while money was being stolen, and the rapid succession of revolutionary policies which have marked some well-designed societies. At the same time I recall with pleasure the order, the care, and the continuity which have counterbalanced the slowness and density of many public Boards. On the whole the best results seem to me to be attained when volunteers supplement official action. The guardians, for instance, teach the children in their schools, but lady visitors befriending those children incline the teaching to the needs of life. The relieving officers discover the cases of poverty, but the visitors of the Charity Organisation Society making friends with the poor discover the means of relief. The School Board works the schools, but the local managers make the work effective for higher education. In the present case, therefore, I am disposed to say that the most practical course would be for the guardians to buy the land, admit the labourers, and administer the farm. By this means the experiment could be made with an adequate support of money, and with a fair promise of permanence, and under the supervision of the myriad-eyed public. it were left to voluntary action there would be the delay consequent on the difficulty of raising money, and then the greater difficulty of getting consistent and persistent management. Because of want of money, or because of excess of zeal, the plan would break down and be discredited without a fair trial. If A training-farm dependent for its support on the moods of the benevolent or on the power of its secretary to write sensational appeals, dependent for its control on the wayward wills of a committee subject now to one leader and now to another, would have no stability, and no subsidy voted by the guardians would add this essential quality. A training-farm under the guardians might partake of the nature of a workhouse; the administration might be rigid, the application of ideas to forms might be slow, the representation of officials might get undue consideration, but the management would be stable, and the service of volunteers would do much to add the individual care and the development which depends on enthusiasm. The only practical and practicable course, it seems to me, is for guardians to take the direction of the scheme. If a further argument be needed it may be found, I think, in the position which guardians occupy in the public mind. They are elected by the ratepayers as the guardians of the poor. They will not be held to have fulfilled their duties if they do nothing but sting the poor to action by refusing out-relief and by making indoor relief ineligible. Tonics are not a universal remedy, and some characters are too weak to endure the tonic of strict treatment. Guardians will be held responsible if, as may well happen during some winter, a chance brings to their gates a starving multitude. They will be asked, why they did not foretell the catastrophe and why they did nothing to prevent it. To be a guardian, and not to guard, is to hold an office without doing its work. Statesmanship consists in prevention more than in cure. It is for the guardians of London to seek, if even they are unable to carry out, the means of settling the problem of the unemployed, of hushing that cry which is so much more bitter because it rises from men who, for want of knowledge, are in poverty, in misery, and in sin. It is for want of character that so many suffer, and those means alone are worth support which are fellow-workers with God to develop character. SAMUEL A. BARNETT. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CONSIDERATIONS of religion were the determining elements, at least for England, in the public affairs of the sixteenth century. Parallel or counter to these ran the motives of private rapine, European influence, and other forces, variously distributed in various countries; but religion was the principal factor. And yet not religion conceived as an affair of the private conscience: not the yearning and the search for the pearl of great price: not an increased predominance of other-worldliness:' but the instinct of national freedom, and the determination to have nothing in religion that should impair it. The penetrating insight of Shakespeare taught him, in delineating King John's defiance to the Pope, to base it, not on the monarch's own very indifferent individuality, but on the national sentiment. Tell him this tale: and from the mouth of England In these words is set down probably the most powerful element of the anti-Roman movement for the sixteenth century. It was in the seventeenth that the forms of personal religion were, for the bulk of the English people, principally determined.2 Henry the Eighth did not create this hostility, but turned it to account; added to it the force of his own imperious and powerful will; and supplied a new ground of action upon which its energies could be mustered and arrayed, in order to sustain a sound or plausible appeal to Scripture against papal prerogative. Henry was, in truth, one of the most papally minded men in England. Sir Thomas More warned him that he had strained the claims of the see of Rome in his book against Luther. But the atmosphere of his soul, like the bag of Aiolos, was charged with violence and tempest, and the stronger blast prevailed. Nothing, Mr. Brewer seems to believe, but the extravagance of his passion for Ann Boleyn could have 1 King John, iii. 1. On this not yet fully explored subject, see Weingarten, Revolutions-Kirchen Englands. |