ON THE PERMANENT LIST

(1905)

"Spend but a few days in the police-court," says Juvenal, "and then call yourself an unhappy man if you dare." Had he sat on a Board of Guardians, he would doubtless have included that also as a school of personal contentment.

All sorts of griefs and tragedies are brought up before us, some of them abnormal and Theban in horror, some of them so common that we seem to hear them unmoved: an honest man who cannot find employment, women with unborn babes kicked, starved, and deserted, children neglected or tortured, poor human beings marred in the making, the crippled, the diseased, the defective physically and mentally, too often the pitiful scapegoats for the sins of the race.

All these things seem too terrible for words or tears; it is the cheeriness and humour of the poor, their pluck and endurance, their kindness and generosity one to another, that bring a lump to the throat and a dimness to the eyes.

We are a very careful Board, and pride ourselves on the strict way in which we administer our small amount of out-relief; to get it at all one must be, as an applicant observed, "a little 'igher than an angel," and so it is the very aristocracy of labour that files past us this morning, men and women against whom even the Charity Organization Society could find no fault, a brave old army, seventy and eighty odd years of age, some of them bent and crippled with rheumatism and weight of years, short of breath, asthmatic, hard of hearing, dim in vision, but plucky to the last, always in terror of looking too ill or too old, and being forced into the workhouse.

A few, like Moses, do not suffer the usual stigmata of age. "Their eye is not dim, nor their natural force abated."

"How do you keep so young?" said our chairman, half-enviously, to an applicant eighty years of age, but upright still, with hair thick and untinged with grey.

"'Igh living does it, sir," replied the old man, as he took his food tickets for the week, amounting to 3s. 1¾d. One old lady of eighty-two runs a private school, and, in spite of the competition of free education and palatial school buildings, she has six pupils, whose parents value individual attention and "manners" at sixpence per head a week. She is fully qualified and certificated, and is a person of strong views and much force of character, and not only holds Solomon's opinions upon corporal punishment in theory, but still puts them into practice. I wonder which of us will have the conviction and energy to cane boys at eighty-two?

We are a very clean Board, and every half-year the relieving officer brings a report as to the condition of the homes; but some of the old people are so withered and shrunken, and their span of remaining life is so short, that there seems little left both of time and space in which dirt can collect, and I always hope death will free them before they are brought into the bleak cleanliness of the House.

Lately in the workhouse one old man took such an affectionate leave of me that I asked him if he felt ill. "Not yet, ma'am, but I have got to have a bath to-night, and the last one I took turned me so queer I was laid up ten weeks in the infirmary. It does you no 'arm, ma'am, very likely—I've 'eard say as the gentry is born and bred to it—but when they starts a-bathing of us poor people for the first time at eighty in them great long coffins full of water, no wonder our rheumatics comes on worse than ever. And then, ma'am, you forget as you ladies and gentlemen 'ave a drop of something hot to keep the cold out afterwards, and I don't blame you for it, but that we never gets."

On the whole, the old ladies keep themselves wonderfully clean and smart, and the cheap drapery stores in the vicinity of the workhouse do a great trade twice a year in violets and rosebuds at 1¾d. a dozen for the adornment of bonnets; feminine instinct is not atrophied by age, and the applicants know the value of a good appearance before "the gentlemen." The old men are not so clever, and when deprived of the ministrations of a wife they seem to have no idea of "mackling" for themselves, and too often lapse into a fatal condition of dirt and hugger-mugger. Sometimes the reports are brought by daughters, nieces, or neighbours, or sometimes "only the landlady"—that abused class showing often much Christian charity and generosity.

Some of the old people have led such blameless lives that members of the C.O.S. offer to take them up and save them from the Poor Law, a privilege they do not always fully appreciate.

"No, thank you, sir, I don't want to go there. I've 'eard of the Charity Organization, and the questions as they ask—Mrs. Smith told me they sifted and sifted her case and give her nothing in the end. I'd rather have a few ha'pence from you, sir."

"But you will be a pauper!" said one of the Guardians, in a sepulchral voice of horror.

"Oh! I don't mind that a bit, sir. My mother was left a widow and on the parish at forty. I'm sixty-seven, and I'd work if I could, but they turned me off at the laundry because the rheumatics has stiffened up my fingers, and I can't wash any more, and I don't see why I shouldn't come on the parish now."

Having no vote, and being accustomed to be classed in the category of "lunatics, criminals, and idiots," no wonder the term "pauper" conveys little opprobrium to women.

"Bother the House!" says another spirited old laundress, who complains that "a parcel of girls" are preferred before her. "I'm too young to come in there. I'm only seventy, and I'll wait till I'm eighty."

One poor old man has his relief stopped because his wife is reported as "a drinking woman," though he is told he may still draw the money if his wife enters the House. "Thank you, sir, my wife does not come into the workhouse. She has a glass sometimes, but she is never the worse for liquor, and she's been a good wife to me. Spiteful gossip, sir. Good morning!" and he walks out, an honourable and loyal gentleman fallen on evil days.

Sometimes cold and starvation is worse than they thought, and they do come in; sometimes they die. The body of an old man was lately fished out of the pond, and at the inquest it was stated that he had lost his employment after thirty years at one place. The firm had changed hands, and the new manager had told him, brutally, "he wanted no old iron about." At seventy-five one is a drag in the labour market, and the poor old fellow, feeling acutely that he would only be a burden on his sons and his daughters, asked neither for out-relief nor indoor-relief, but stood his mates a drink with his last shilling, and took the old Roman method.

However, light seems dawning through the darkness, and I think many Poor Law Guardians will rest better in their beds knowing that old-age pensions seem to have come into the sphere of practical politics.