Note 214 — Chapter XI

For the last twelve years, says a living practical philanthropist, I have been considerably engaged in the administration of Poor Law Relief. I could not disguise from my reluctant notice the painful fact of how large and overwhelming a percentage of applicants for relief had been, for long periods of their life, in the habit of earning wages, the surplus of which remaining over and above the cost of their maintenance, would, if properly invested, have secured them an honourable independent subsistence for the unproductive residue of their lives. Their frugal contemporaries, whom they scandalized by their example (and it might have been said, derided for what they considered their meanness), they further tax with the burden of their subsistence. They commit a constructive injustice upon their more provident fellow-citizens; and when society inveighs against the gratuitous pauper, not because he is poor, but because he has viciously made himself so, society is not unjust in such a retaliation upon its trespassers. The gracious law of England, which makes the Poor Law compulsory, would deal with scarcely more than even-handed justice were it to compel some kind of club payment too. And if it were an infringement of the liberty of the subject to compel my neighbour to support a club, it is an infringement of my liberty to compel me to support my neighbour.—Meliora, edited by Viscount Ingestre, vol. ii.