Licence: In copyright
Credit: The prevention of destitution / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
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![is deprived of any of these things its efficiency will suffer in the same way as that of a horse that is not properly tended or a steam engine that has an inadequate supply of coals. All consumi^tion i\p to this limit is strictly productive consumption, any stinting of this consumption is not economical, but wasteful (Dr. Alfred Marshall, late Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, in Principles of Economics). Page 2. With regard to the condition of the most destitute stratum of the population, the student should consiilt not only the works of the Eight Hon. Charles Booth (Life and Labour of the People in London (3892-1903), etc.) and Mr. B. Seebohm Kowntree {Poverty), being a corresponding study of York (1901), but also General Booth's In Darkest England (1890); the Report on the Physical Condition of 1,400 School Children in Edinburgh (1907), the monographs that have been prepared on social conditions in Cambridge (by E. Jebb, now Mrs. Wilkins); West Ham (by. M. M. Howarth and Moua Wilson); Norvfich (by A. Hawkins); At the Works, by Lady Bell (1907), being a description of Middlesbrough; and for rural conditions. Life in an English Village, by Miss Maud Davies (1909). See also The Wastage of Cliild Life as exemplified by .conditions in Lancashire, by Dr. J. Johnson (Fifield, 1909); and Report on the Housing and Industrial Con- ditions and Medical Inspection of School Children in Dundee (Dundee Social Union, 1908). Page 2. The Poverty Line is the level of income necessary for the bare sustenance of the worker and a normal family, under existing urban conditions. For a description of the method of calculation, and a discussion of its value, see Poverty, by B. Seebohm Rowntree (Macmillan), the well- known statistical survey of the social conditions of the workers in York The relation of this line to that taken for London in Life and Labour of the People, by the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth is disucussed in Professor Macgregor's article, Poverty Figures, in Economic Journal for December, Page 3. The best and most easily accessible statistics of pauperism are 0 be found m the Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission. 1909 (Part 11.. pp. 30-78 of official 8vo edition). These deal, however, only with England and Wales. For Scotland and Ireland, see the Annual Reports of the Local Government Boards for Scotland and Ireland respectively The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission (the official 8vo edition) gives exact statistics for the whole United Kingdom under each head. Page 8. With regard to Professor Bernard Bosauquet's views, the reader may be referred to an able article on The Majority Report fof the Poor Law Commission] in the Sociological Revieiv for April, 1909 The Majority he says proceed upon the principle that where there is a failure of social self-maintenance in the sense above defined, there is a .1' fW ?r ^liaracter. or at least a grave danger to its integrity; and that therefore every case of this kind raises a problem which is moral m the sense of affecting the whole capacity of self-management, to begin with m the person who has failed, and secondarily, in the whole '° i'^fl«ced by expectation and example (pp 114-5) thl EuInfcTl ioMov^ir.^ statement by a Committee of the Eugenics Education Society:- The experience of the Committee is quite clear that the paupers whom they have seen and examined individually are characterised by some obvious vice or defect such as drunkenness theft persisten laziness, a tubercular diathesis, mental deficiency, de berate moral obliquity, or general weakness of character, manifested by 2 initiative, or energy, or stamina, and an inclination to attribute ^heir](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21361149_0027.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
