Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.

  • Alfred Russel Wallace
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    'ti] Our Justice is Immoral system of money-fines, often for merely nominal oñences, with the alternative of imprisonment. To the well-ofí, or to the habitual criminal, the fine is a triñe ; but to the poor man charged with being drunk, with begging, or with sleeping under a hay¬ stack, or any such act which is no real offence, the common punishment of los. or a week's imprisonment, leaving perhaps wife and children to starve or be sent to the workhouse, is really far more immoral than the alleged offence. Again, our Poor Law itself, as usually administered, is utterly immoral. This is what a competent authority—Mr. Sidney Webb—says of it : Underneath the feet of the whole wage-earning class is the abyss of the Poor Law. I see before me a respectable family applying for relief. What do we do to them ? We, the Government of England, break up the family. We strip each individual of what makes life worth living. When the man enters the workhouse he is stripped of his citizenship— branded as too infamous to vote for a member of Parliament. Once in the workhouse, we put him to toil or to loiter under conditions that are so demoralis¬ ing that we turn him into a wastrel. And we strip the wife of her children. We send her to the wash- tub or the sewing-room, where she associates with prostitutes and imbeciles. The little children, if they F 65
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