The Pauper System

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 14, 8 April 1909, Page 529

The Pauper System

It seems as if the British Isles are at last within reach of some reform of those scandals of our time, those graves of decent poverty, the costly and inefficient union workhouse's. As far back as 1837 J)ickens scourged the grosser abuses of the system in the pathetic pages ,of his Oliver Twist. Therein he depicted, in many a moving incident, the sorrows of the poor, starved, ill-treated boy, who preserved a pure, gentle, and loving saul amidst the heartless cruelty of the workhouse system. . And, on the other hand, he depicted the arrogance of parish authority dressed in the little brief authority of a Bumble, who was shocked almost to speechlessness at the unparalleled daring cf hungry little Oliver asking for ( more ' of the thin and unsatisfying gruel or ' skilly ' that made a thin partition between existence and death by starvation. A Poor Law Commission has been making exhaustive inquiries into the system. The London special correspondent of the Dunedin li'ucnmr/ Star says that they have just issued two reports — a majority report and a minority report. Both condemn the system. And both recommend (says the Star's correspondent): 'A discontinuance of the term "Poor Law" with its unpleasant associations. The use of the phrase "public assistance" instead of "Poor Law relief." A complete change in the present constitution of workhouses. The provision of special accommodation for the sick, the aged, the mentally feeble, and the young. Closer co-opera-tion between public assistance and private charity. A national scheme of labor exchanges. Labor colonies for the worklcss, with places of detention, with sxiitable labor, for the "won't works."'

We hope that the British Isles are. now near the eni of the penal treatment of decent poverty that was first introduced into Christian countries during the great religious revolution of the sixteonth century.