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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

240.: THE POOR LAWS EXAMINER, 9 MAR., 1834, PP. 145-6 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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240.

THE POOR LAWS

EXAMINER, 9 MAR., 1834, PP. 145-6

For the context, see No. 239. This article is in the “Political Examiner,” headed as title, and is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘The Poor Laws’ in the Examiner of 9th March 1834” (MacMinn, p. 38). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as title.

the question of poor law amendment is so complicated in its details, and so much care is needed in discussing it, to guard our meaning from all sorts of perverse misunderstanding and misinterpretation, that we are unwilling to enter into the minutiae of the subject, until we have more thoroughly studied the Report of the Commissioners. There is no reason, however, for not declaring at once that their investigations appear to us to have ended in the most complete justification of the principle of the Poor Laws, and the severest condemnation of their practice.

The principle of securing, by a legal provision, the actual necessaries of life and health to all who cannot otherwise obtain them, we consider as now placed out of the reach of dispute by any unprejudiced person. Many of the wisest men have hitherto doubted of this principle, only because they did not know, what the Commissioners have demonstrated not by argument only, but by the most decisive specific experience, that the effect imputed to compulsory relief, of discouraging voluntary exertion, and promoting improvidence, may be certainly obviated by a proper attention to the conditions on which relief is given.

These conditions, the Commissioners propose should be such as would render the condition of the infirm and helpless more eligible than at present, and that of the able-bodied pauper (whose condition is now far more desirable than the situation of the independent labourer) less eligible; and they have shown, what is of the very utmost importance, that the able-bodied pauper may be secured against cold and hunger, and provided with all the means of bodily health and strength, being at the same time neither overworked nor subjected to any other kind of bodily suffering, and may yet be in a condition inferior to that of the labourer subsisting honestly on his own industry. The mere privation of indulgences, and the sacrifice of so much liberty as is given up by submitting to the discipline of a well-regulated workhouse, are quite sufficient, if properly enforced, to make every able-bodied pauper desire to extricate himself from pauperism; and wherever this has been tried, all, or nearly all, the able-bodied paupers have speedily found employment, not only without a fall, but with an actual rise, of wages throughout the parish.

The Commissioners have in view, as an ultimate end, the abolition of out-door relief to able-bodied paupers, but not to the aged and helpless, nor even to the able-bodied where peculiar circumstances require an exception; though we deem the principle so important, that we trust exceptions will be very rarely allowed. Neither do they propose to introduce the rule suddenly, but gradually. The Times must have read their Report very carelessly, or it could not have taken up, and communicated to its readers the impression that all the relieved poor were to be brought into workhouses.1

The writer in the Times is in complete contradiction to himself. He begins by admitting that the condition of the pauper must be made inferior to that of the independent labourer, and then raises the cry of inhumanity against the only possible means by which this can be done. To bring a poor family into the workhouse, he says, is to make their poverty a disgrace. We answer, it is simply to make their poverty known, or rather to make the fact known that they are living upon the labour of others. If this is objected to, how is the condition of the pauper to be made inferior to that of the independent labourer? It cannot be by starving him! Yet that is the alternative to which the sentimentality of the Times would reduce us. If living upon parish relief is to be made desirable, there is no more to be said. But why set out with proclaiming that it is to be made undesirable, and then object to the means proposed, because they really have that effect? In America the independent labourer is so well off, that by merely giving to the applicant for relief less money than the ordinary wages of labour, you would give him a strong motive to cease to be a pauper as soon as he could get work. But here, the independent labourer earns so little, that you cannot give the pauper less; you can only give him that little on harder terms. If it be given at his own dwelling he is made better off than the independent labourer, because he will, in that case, whatever you may attempt to the contrary, do less work for it. In the workhouse, and the workhouse alone, can the bodily wants of the pauper be amply cared for, and yet pauperism be rendered not shameful (that is not the object), but undesirable.

[1 ]Leading article, The Times, 25 Feb., 1834, p. 2.