Shall we have a Poor-rate?

Thames Star, Issue 3082, 3 January 1879, Page 2

Shall we have a Poor-rate?

The Rev. J. Upton Davis, of Dunedin, preaching for the Benevolent Institution ventured to deal with this difficult topic.

Two axioms may be laid down at the outset that few, if any, will have the hardihood to question. The first axiom is this: All indiscriminate charity is in the end more pernicious than useful. "It ,V fosters beggary, it creates pauperism, it increases poverty. The second axiom is this : Private direct help is always preferable to indirect public charity. It/is dangerous, even, when public charjty becomes the mainstay of poverty. It is an evil when private benevolence isrregarded only as a supplement to public aid. Public charity should never be counted more than the last reserve on which necessity falls back when private help is exhausted. Private direct gifts are the regular forces in the army which fights with indigence and want. Public doles are but the militia"—the volunteers—and should only be called out on service when personal pity can do no more. This distinction is of the utmost importance. To ignore it will confuse all methods of benevolence. To observe, it will go far to put upon the right track.ia this matter in ministering to necessitous cases, in detecting and rejecting undeserving ones, and in preventing a wasteful expenditure of public funds. This will colour and fix our opinion as to the way in which the means of public charity should be raised, as well as the way.in which they should be expended. This brings me to the very gist and pith of my remarks this morning. I have heard it ■uggested in private that a poor-rate should be levied in place of free gifts for our Benevolent Institution. It has even been mooted in Parliament that this is the one swift solution of the question of charitable aid. There can be little doubt that the Hon. Mr Fisher has been met very often with this suggestion: "Start a poor-rate; that will be the short and easy method." Politicians are always tempted by shortaud easy methods; they like to cut knots instead of patiently trying to untie them, as true statesmen would. It is therefore quite time that we should look at this notion from the point of view which is given us in a Christian pity for' the poor—a pity that is firm, wise, and tender. Christ teaches us to lenrn from history and from experience. The poor-. rate system has been tried for three centuries in England. It has been amended and altered without amendment over and over again. It has been patched up in many weak places. The belt patching has been a miserable boggle after all. The whole principle and tendency of the system are wrong, rotten, and ruinous; and no modification of the method can ever make them right, healthy, and helpful. The system,is the despair of legislators, the fair butt of philosophers, and the vexation of sympathetic Christian philanthropy. If any* thing can warn us in a new country in the history of an old one—it is the painful tale of misery, helplessness, hardness, and bad made-worse which belongs -to the story of poor-rates in England. Woe worth the day when—to save trouble on one side or squeeze a few pounds from unwilling churl's on the other—anything like this shall be grafted on the society of, New Zealand ! Better, by far, that some of our poor shou'd be unreached by free gifts every winter than that—to cover these cases, if indeed they would be covered—-we should welcome a system which before half-a-century has elapsed will yield such fruits as we' know it to have produced at home. Not We have the opportunity, and let us use it to save our descendants from this incubus, to keep poverty within the limits of slow growth, and hand dawn to our children a holy spirit of honorable pride, m in which they shall freely-and readily do ■ in their turn what we have tried to do in ours—and make even public charity -a- 1" welcome boon, because it is not fqrced from men by levied rates, but won- by, appeal to sentiments of generosity, sympathy and love—to the enthusiasm of ■■ humanity fed by the sacrifice of the Cross. The poor-rate system gives'tße poor man a right to public help. This ; right, however, has always been main-: tamed under two limitations —residence and destitution. The limit of residence has worsted countless evils in every parish ' in former times; it is working similar mischief in the wider districts of the Unions now. The poor rate system has ' to be supplemented by a complicated system of "settlement." Such a system is almost impossible in a country like this, where the very poor are the most migratory of our population. And even if put in force, it would entail here as elsewhere a constant interference -with' the labor market, and so intensify, the evil it is designed to diminish. The second limit of right required proof of utter destitution before helpH* granted. This bat resu'ted in large cities imposing the "indoor" test, by which the poor are,compelled to enter the poor-house or refused assistance: The temptation to such an easy an^shbpla . method (easy for the administrators, bat terribly hard for the recipients) can be always guarded against. This test breaks up homes, perpetuates poverty in families, ' destroys self-help, and cultivates pauperism instead of slowly rooting it out. Apart from these allied difficulties, the right to relief,- established by poor rates,' as I'r. Chalmers argued long since, blocks up the proper channels of mutual help, and even, dries up in most cases the natural springs of self-reliance, prudent foresight, relative obligations, and bene- '. volent generosity. " Mercy is twice/

blessed: it blesses him that gives and him that takes." Our relief of poverty ought to have the compassionate properties of mercy. But a poor rate is twice cursed: it curses him that gives and him that takes. I pass by the unreadiness with which we all pay rates asid taxes; andevery hou9eholderpays them with some grudge. I pass by the unwillingness of the poor to receire assistance from enforced contributions; though the noblest and best ot men and women shrink from this deepest depth with the most loathing. And I direct your attention to the salient evils which the poor-rate system —establishing as it does a right to relief—works in the general sentiment of all ranks, by lowering the tone of thought, feeling, and action in society. The poor man knows that without pushing himself there is a certain bare provision for his family in dire need. He therefore grows sluggishly | content with a mere pittance fora livelihood. Wages keep down, for rates keep up. He marries before he lias even a distant pro^W^t of maintaining his children. He makes no store for old age ; why should he, when he has a right to be fed and clothed and warmed on the rates ? He has not supported his own parents ; he will not be supported by his own children. His boys and giris are turned out before they can read; for if they don't get on, the poor-law must keep them from starving. Thus each generation grows worse than the previous ones. The mischief, I acknowledge, is not patent at once; but such depraved sentiments as I have described is the ultimate and inevitable rpsult of the right to relief which a poor-rate establishes. I acknowledge, too. that the poor-rate is a most easy and simple method of raising funds. There is a fatal facility about it which leads on one side to extravagance, and on the other creates the very misery it is at the outset imagined to relieve. Nor is the mischief confined to the expectant recipients of legal bounty. The wealthy, the well-to-do, and especially those just above the line which marks the probable advent of poverty, suffer a moral degradation too. They open their purseBtrings grudgingly to the tax gatherer, and revenge themselves in the interval by buttoning up their pockets with inhuman complacency. They pay rates on all that they possess; what in the name of decency can be required of them further ! The result is only too manifest. Ten thousand talents are wrapped up in the napkins of hardbeartedness. There is no usury of grateful distress nor interest of tender charitableness. Benevolence is dwarfed into legality. And so in all classes, the tendency of a poor-rate is in the direction of the most sensual vices. II It hardens all within, and petrifies the feeling." I am well aware of the main arguments by which a poor-rate is being urged upon us. They are only two. This one is that rates compel the hard-fisted men amongst us to take their share of the burden, and do not allow these churls to go scot-free. The other is, that only by such a universal levy can we overtake and meet the growing distress. Looked at only as you would look at a statement of accounts, or the prospectus of a joint-stock company, there is great force iv both these pleas. They are not, however, absolutely convincing. For until it is proved that gifts cannot deal with poverty (if they are asked for on true principles, and dispensed in a wise way), the forced contribution of churlish citizens may be left out of the question. This inadequacy of benevolence has not yet been proved, but the contrary, by the experience of the last 15 years in this Province and City; and though I may seem Quixotic when I am only Christian, I would urge that the true remedies for inadequate means are to be sought, not by drawing the golden teeth of selfishness, but by backing up Christian evangelism with Christian teaching, and exemplifying Christian teaching by Christian practioe. Let those whose hearts are stirred in this matter occupy themselves in constant and urgent persuasions. Let those who are able and willing redouble their efforts, and increase their own gifts. It is a happy law of life that " the willing horse does all the work." It is a Divine obligation upon Christ's duciples to act towards the poor as Christ acted towards us ; and, whether other men wiJl give or not give f to see that poor folk are not left destitute, and to infuse into all help the fragrant aroma of kind feeling and willing generosity.