The Scottish Poor Law : examined in its principles and tried by its results : with suggestion of remedies / by Alexander Wood.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Scottish Poor Law : examined in its principles and tried by its results : with suggestion of remedies / by Alexander Wood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Dr Chalmers remark in bitter irony— If a pauper really have the same claim in right and equity to relief that a ser- vant has to wages, why treat the two claims so differently ? It seems a strange way of meeting a demand for justice, that when a man prefers his claim, he must be separated from his home, put into confinement, and subjected to the irksome and gaUing restraints of a prison discipline. Such are the correc- tives by which, under a reformed Poor Law, it is attempted to redress the evils of its former administration. The assertion of what their own statute-book declares to be right is followed up by the same treatment—in kind, at least, if not in degree— with the commission of what the same statute-book declares to be a wrong. In other words, their paupers meet with the same treatment as their felons. The same terrors and penalties have been devised to prevent the undue multiplication of the one class as to prevent the undue multipHcation of the other. Lest men should perpetrate crimes with an inconvenient fre- quency, jails and gibbets have been erected in all parts of the country 3 and lest men should put forth claims (and of that class, too, which they acknowledge to be rightful) with incon- venient frequency—not gibbets, but at least houses nearly as repulsive as jails have been erected in all parts of the country. The truth is, they have been made as repulsive as possible, for the very purpose of scaring applicants away. It was found of the law in its old state that it tended to agrarianism, and would at length have obliterated all the fences by which property is guarded; and hence a new law which retained the old principle, but changed the old practice—the principle being that every human creature in want has a right to relief; and the practice being as if, though this be a right, it were a very wrong thing in either man or woman to assert it. And so they attempt to steer evenly in this matter by what mathematicians would term a compensation of errors.* In Scotland, too, we seem to be ringing the same changes. At the meeting of the Social Science Association held in Edin- burgh in 1863, Mr Walker of Bowland, the present chairman • «\Collected Works, vol. xxi,, p. 151.
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