"The position in this district has reached a stage where something immediate has to be done, and the only course open to the Guardians is to meet the numerous applications made to them by grants of out-door relief. The total amount of out-door relief now being granted by the Guardians exceeds £690 per week, and is borne entirely by local rates, which already stand at 10s. in the £, and will considerably increase by the addition of this extra relief.
"If the public were assured that the problem would be seriously taken up by his Majesty's Government at an early date, funds might be forthcoming to bridge over the present period of anxiety.
"The Guardians desire to emphasise the fact that this question of dealing with the unemployed has been several times before Parliament, and if the Government really desire to grapple with this great evil, they could, in a short time, with the expert advice at the disposal of the Government, set in operation a great deal of work useful to the nation. The Guardians, therefore, sincerely hope that their previous representations will be acted upon, and that you will give an assurance that the matter shall be laid before Parliament at the earliest possible moment."
A Breakdown from Overwork—Health Permanently Impaired—Appointment of a Royal Commission on the Poor Law—Saving the Unemployed Bill—Need of Money to Work the Bill—Mrs. Crooks heads the Women's March to Whitehall—Mr. Balfour's Sympathetic but Unsatisfactory Reply—Queen Alexandra's Intervention—A Vote of Money in the New Parliament.
The labour and anxiety, the long arduous days and the sleepless nights Crooks endured that winter for the unemployed, culminated in a sudden and serious illness.
The attack was short, but dangerous. His doctor reported that unless a change took place within a few hours it would be a case for confinement to bed for at least three months. Fortunately, the welcome change came.
A few days before he took to his bed he got a severe shaking by a fall while jumping off a 'bus in the Strand. That was not the cause of his illness, however. The real cause, as his medical man declared, was nervous breakdown due to overwork. His overwork had all been in the direction of trying to get work for the unemployed.
He fretted himself into a worse condition during the first few days of his illness. Every night, instead of sleeping, he was mentally putting hosts of unemployed men to work.
The sympathy and affection shown during his illness by his neighbours at Poplar affected him deeply. All day long callers of all sorts and conditions were making inquiries and leaving messages of good-will. Labourers, mechanics, widows, children, tradesmen, public men, officials, Free Church ministers, Anglican clergymen, Roman Catholic priests, and Sisters of the Poor were among those who came to the door once the news leaked out that the man from their midst, whom they had so often delighted to honour, lay sick and in danger. Their sympathy was intensified by the knowledge that Mrs. Crooks herself had not wholly recovered from a serious operation that had kept her for weeks in hospital.
That breakdown shattered him for life. He has never been the same in health since, and knows he can never be the same again. Sometimes for weeks together he endures agonising nervous pains, deprived of sleep and rest, yet all the time steadily refusing to slacken his labours for those whom he is fond of calling "the people at our end of the town."
As soon as he was able to get out again in the New Year (1905), he took up the case for the unemployed, if not with all his former zeal, certainly with all the zeal he could then command.
Towards the end of January he had so far recovered as to be able to attend the Liverpool Conference of the Labour Representation Committee. He was then in a position to make public for the first time that the King's Speech at the opening of Parliament in the following month would in all likelihood promise an Unemployed Bill. On his motion the Conference decided:
That the policy of the Labour Party in Parliament relating to unemployment should be to secure fuller powers for the local authorities to acquire and use land, to re-organise the local administrative machinery for dealing with poverty and unemployment, to bring pressure on the Government to put the recommendations of the Afforestation Committee into effect, to undertake forthwith, through the Board of Trade, the reclamation of foreshores, and to create a Labour Ministry.
His forecast of the King's Speech proved correct. An Unemployed Bill was promised. It was introduced on April 18th by Mr. Gerald Balfour, who had succeeded Mr. Long at the Local Government Board. The Bill confirmed Mr. Long's scheme of Distress Committees in London, and provided for the formation of similar bodies in provincial towns. It granted the principle of State aid by permitting the cost of organisation, including the provision of farm colonies, to be charged to the rates, leaving it to voluntary subscriptions to provide a fund for paying the men's wages.
That Session was made memorable to Crooks in another sense. A Royal Commission on the Poor Law was appointed, and although it was little faith he had in Commissions generally, he believed that, whatever came of the recommendations of this one, it would help the people of England to see, while its investigations were going on, something of the cruelty and folly of a system which had been ruthlessly thrust upon the voteless labouring people by the middle class individualists who came into power after the Reform Act of 1832. His fellow Guardian, George Lansbury, was appointed a member of the Commission—a notable compliment to Poplar, which for a dozen years had striven to make this soulless system humane and helpful.
Although the Unemployed Bill passed second reading with a majority of 217, the Session dragged wearily on with little prospect of its getting through the Committee stage and becoming law. When August dawned and the House found itself within a week of adjournment, everyone but Crooks despaired of getting the measure through. The Prime Minister told the House there was no time for the Bill. Several of Crooks's Labour colleagues declared the Bill to be too meagre a thing to fight for.
"I admit its faults and shortcomings as readily as anyone," he argued with his Party; "but it contains the germ of a great principle—State recognition of the need and State aid in carrying out the organisation."
Almost alone he fought for the Bill in the last days of the Session. He urged the Government to save the unemployed from foolish and useless rioting by holding out to them the hope which the passing of the Bill would convey.
By a dramatic coincidence, on the very afternoon he was thus warning the Government the police were charging a crowd of desperate unemployed in Manchester.
"The Prime Minister urges the plea that there is no time," Crooks went on to tell the House. "What would the business men of this House think, when they went down to their offices to-morrow, if they were told by the manager that grouse-shooting would begin on the Twelfth and that therefore business would have to be suspended? Does the Government prefer grouse-shooting to finding work for honest men? Was this Bill of theirs only introduced to kill time—to wait until the birds were big enough to be shot? I don't want to stop your holidays. Go and kill your grouse and your partridges. But are you going to put dead birds before living men?
"There was the day on which the Eton and Harrow match was played. What will the unemployed say when they hear that the Government could not find time to discuss this Bill because Ministers wished to see two schools play cricket? Do you think the working man gets a day off to see his sons play cricket in the public parks? Unlike many hon. members of this House, workmen do not live by dividends. They have nothing to sell but their labour. When out of work a little help often saves them from ruin and pauperism. They are only asking to be given an opportunity to fulfil the Divine curse by earning their living in the sweat of their brow."
His appeal went home. The following day the Government sprang a surprise on the House. The Bill would be taken that week. It was passed within a few days. "H. W. M.," in his parliamentary sketch in the Daily News of August 5th, referring to what he called "the strange story of the passing of the Unemployed Bill," said:
At the end of last week its chances seemed to have disappeared. To-day it has passed Committee, and Monday will see it through the Commons. The Member chiefly responsible for this issue is Mr. Crooks, who has shown undoubted subtleness as a Parliamentary tactician.
In his final speech on the Bill, Crooks argued that even the loafer would become a better man by being given, not the charity that demoralised, but a day's work for a day's pay. Such a man, by being put on a farm colony for a few months, would be turned into a good citizen. He stood for discipline in Labour as the Government stood for discipline in the Army and Navy. He wanted to preserve the manhood of the nation rather than to see it degraded, as it was by the present system of despising an unemployed man. The type of men who hung idle about all our large towns was the type that filled the workhouses and prisons. Take them in their early stages of unemployment, put them under proper discipline on the land, and he was prepared to prophesy they would become useful citizens. It was a loss to the nation that men and women should be going about without the common necessaries owing to being out of work.
So the Bill went through, and people of all classes agree with his old friend, Mr. A. F. Hills, a large employer, who wrote to him a letter on the subject, ending with the words: "I believe that generations yet unborn will in the years to come rise up and call you blessed."
In the opinion of many people well able to gauge the distress and discontent of the country, the Act came just in time to prevent serious disorders in the large towns. For the winter that immediately followed found the unemployed in a worse plight than ever.
Promptly the Distress Committees formed under the Act got to work. The London Committees found themselves at first stranded for funds. The weak point in the Act was that which allowed only the expense of organisation to be made a public charge. The Committees found themselves asking, What was the use of organising work for the unemployed when there were no means of paying wages? It looked as though public subscriptions were not to be forthcoming. Was the Act, so hardly won, to fail on its first trial?
Again Poplar fought the cause of the poor for the whole country. This time the workless men's wives took action. The women of Poplar met in the Town Hall, Mrs. Crooks in the chair, with the object of urging Parliament to vote money to the Distress Committees set up under the new Act.
Mrs. Crooks, as reported in the Times, said:
They were endeavouring to enlist the help and sympathy of those in high places to give some little time to the consideration of the claims of the wives and children of men who were willing to work, but who were unable to find the wherewithal to feed those near and dear to them. The Queen had more than once shown her desire to help. Was it, then, too much to expect that their wealthy sisters would use their influence with their all-too-powerful husbands to appeal, with the women of Poplar, to the King and Government to call Parliament together with a view to passing estimates to enable work to be undertaken—work that would give them their daily bread? Theirs was a cry for national defence, and Parliament must see to it.
The meeting decided to petition the King to instruct the Prime Minister to call Parliament together. In acknowledging a vote of thanks to his wife for taking the chair, Crooks said the mothers and sisters had remained too long indoors, suffering in silence. If the King could see that meeting it would make him realise what unemployment meant to the wives and mothers of his industrial army, and he would no doubt do something to ensure that they should not lack the sustenance needed to bring up strong daughters and strong sons as faithful and loyal citizens. They had got the machinery, and they had got certain powers, but they needed funds. They had got an organisation that could gather up all the information as to useful work that needed doing—work that would be profitable and inspiring to the men who did it, instead of being degrading, like the foolish and useless and expensive task-work which was all the Poor Law had to offer.
Mr. & Mrs. WILL CROOKS
Photo: G. Dendry.
About a month later took place the memorable women's march to Whitehall. The day, November 6th, was truly a tragic and historic one in the social life of London.
Headed by Mrs. Crooks and the then Mayoress of Poplar (Mrs. Dalton), some six thousand poor women gathered on the Thames Embankment, near Charing Cross Bridge, and marched to the offices of the Local Government Board in order to back up their appeal to the Premier to aid their out-of-work husbands and brothers. The women came not only from Poplar, where the march had been organised by George Lansbury, but from Edmonton, Paddington, West Ham, Woolwich, and Southwark. Some carried infants in arms; others had children dragging at their skirts.
"Work for our men—Bread for our children." So ran the appeal on the banner that floated above the Southwark contingent, led by Mrs. Herbert Stead.
The Embankment was deep in mud, and, as the women trudged bravely through it—those carrying babies unable to save their skirts from dragging in the road—the scene was one that filled you with an indignant shame. Even those other women in motors and carriages, who had driven down to see the sight out of curiosity, sank back into their cushions aghast, sickened, ashamed at this spectacle of their sisters' plight.
In Whitehall the processionists told off a dozen of their number to form the deputation to Mr. Balfour. The women were accompanied into the Local Government Board offices by Crooks and Lansbury and two or three other men from the Central Workers' Unemployed Committee.
The object of the visit was explained by Lansbury, and then a working woman from Poplar read the women's memorial. The memorial spoke of the misery, degradation, and desperation of the women which had driven them to determine to bear their lot in silence no longer. They thought that Parliament should make it impossible for unscrupulous employers to grind the faces of the poor. The Government had gone to the aid of the tenantry of Ireland. The plight of the poor in London was worse. If war were threatened, ways would be found for raising money. The country was faced with a worse evil than war in the presence of starving citizens. In the name of their country, their homes, and their children, they appealed to the Prime Minister not to send them empty away.
Several of the workless men's wives who, it had been arranged, should speak broke down; so Mrs. Crooks explained they had not come to utter words only; they had come as Englishwomen, driven to despair, in the hope that the Premier, as the chief Minister of the King, would no longer leave them in a worse condition than that of his dogs and horses.
Mr. Balfour was sympathetic, but had nothing to suggest. He saw no hope of Parliament voting money. The deputation came away sullen and disappointed. For the time it looked as though the women's march had been in vain. But, before a week passed, another woman spoke. The need was met by Queen Alexandra. On November 13th her Majesty issued her famous appeal:
"I appeal to all charitably disposed people in the Empire, both men and women, to assist me in alleviating the suffering of the poor starving unemployed during this winter. For this purpose I head the list with £2,000."
Before the winter was over the public, in response to this appeal, subscribed £150,000—a sum that proved sufficient that winter to keep Distress Committees going in London and elsewhere during the time of greatest privation.
The needs of the next winter were provided for by the State. The new Liberal Government had not been in office many months before it voted £200,000 to the Distress Committees appointed under the Unemployed Act.
Poplar had done its work. The women had marched to victory.
Crooks becomes a Grandfather—A Glimpse of his Home Life—Mr. G. R. Sims on "A Morning with Will Crooks"—Crooks's Daily Post-bag—Sample Letters—Speaking at Religious and Temperance Meetings—On Adult Sunday Schools—On the Licensing Bill—A Homily to Free Churchmen.
By this time Crooks had moved from Northumberland Street to Gough Street, a few minutes' walk away. The change was from a five-roomed house to a six-roomed house, "with exactly three and a half feet more space for a garden at the back," as he jocularly described it.
His two eldest daughters had both married, and his eldest son, who was doing well at the same trade his father learnt—that of cooper—had also settled down to married life in Poplar. This son had the pleasure one day of telephoning to his father at the County Council offices, just after the latter had passed his fiftieth birthday, "You became a grandfather this morning. Cheer up!"
Another daughter qualified at the Cheltenham Training College as a school teacher. The youngest daughter elected to be "mother's right hand at home." The youngest son was apprenticed in a Thames shipbuilding yard.
Of his children he would often remark, during the controversy over religious education in schools, that they seemed to disprove the theories of both contending parties. One of his daughters and a son, who were educated in Board Schools, became communicating members of the Church of England, while two daughters educated in Church of England schools afterwards became Nonconformists.
A glimpse of his home life was given in the "Celebrities at Home" series, published in the World. The writer described Gough Street as a row of tiny houses so much alike that the only difference between one and another was the number on the door.
But if you did not know Mr. Crooks's number, you could guess his house by waiting at the corner of the street. Because, between half-past nine and half-past ten, the door-knocker of No. 81 will beat a tattoo twelve or twenty times to the hour, when all the other knockers are silent. For this is the hour when Mr. Crooks is at home and receives his visitors, while he takes his breakfast in a spasmodic and interrupted manner—bad, one feels sure, for his digestion. They are not social callers. They come because they want something—an order for free medicine or for an artificial limb, for advice as to a likely quarter to get work, for a hundred and one needs of poor people who have no resources of their own.
They are pleasant rooms in which the Labour member finds the best happiness of his life. They are not large. They are not handsomely furnished, for a Labour member has no need of luxury; but to Mr. Crooks every little adornment in them has its own story to tell and its own pleasant memory. On one of the walls are two oil paintings of ships in distress—"good or bad," says Mr. Crooks, "I'm no judge," But they are valuable to him, because they were painted by a man down on his luck, as a thanksgiving for a good turn done to him by the only friend he had.
"Bless you," says Mr. Crooks, "they all bring me little things, and I can't refuse them. See that champagne glass on the piano? That was given me by a poor old lady I used to look after a bit. That wine glass on the other side came from another old friend. Someone will bring me a China shepherd, another a vase or candlestick, or a comic pig. It's pleasant, you know!"...
Mr. Crooks is one of the pleasantest and most interesting men to visit. If you take him at the right time—half-past nine o'clock—it means an early journey from the West!—he will sit you down to a plate of porridge and give you more information about the life of the working-classes in the course of an hour than the most laborious reading of Blue-books will do in a lifetime.
The visitor must be prepared for interruptions. In a corner of the breakfast-room is a member of the family who likes to have his say. It is a poll-parrot—"as cunning as a barge-load of monkeys," says his owner affectionately. He has a peculiar habit of cracking invisible filbert-nuts at the back of his throat, rather disconcerting to a stranger; and although he dotes on Mr. Crooks, it is a little game of his to snub the Labour member by depreciatory remarks and scornful whistles of derision. But he always has an affectionate "Goo'-bye, Will!" for his master when he puts on his hat in the morning. To Mrs. Crooks he is always courteous. "Goo'-morning, mother!" he says, when the lady comes down to breakfast, and thrusts his beak out for a kiss. Then he calls "Tilly! Tilly!" in a shrill voice, like an elderly landlady, and is not satisfied till Mrs. Crooks's pretty, black-eyed daughter has given him his morning greeting.
"He has his little prejudices, like the rest of us," says Mr. Crooks. "He can't abide babies, and squawks at them fearfully."
Mr. George R. Sims gave a sketch of "A Morning with Will Crooks" in the Daily Chronicle of May 2nd, 1906. He suggested that if 81, Gough Street—Crooks's Castle, as he called it—had a brass plate on the door, the most appropriate device to be inscribed upon it would be, "Inquire within upon everything."
It was twenty minutes past ten when I arrived. At half-past ten we were due at the relieving office. But before we started, some three or four pathetic narratives had found their way into the little hall for Mr. Crooks to mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
I appreciated the situation, and expressed sympathy.
"It is depressing," said the people's M.P., "but, after all, somebody's got to listen and somebody's got to help."
We went out into the street. In the hundred yards that we walked to our destination six sad riddles of life were submitted to Mr. Crooks for solution.
The broad-shouldered, black-bearded, smiling politician of the people had a cheery word of advice for all applicants, and scarcely had these pavement consultations ended before we were seated in the relieving office listening to tales of woe told by a procession of poor petitioners with whom the world had gone woefully wrong.
The committee of relief were generous and sympathetic. Poplar has a reputation for generosity in this matter. It struck me that at times the committee might have impressed a little more earnestly upon the recipients of out-relief the other side of the situation; but I am bound to admit that undeserving cases—cases which had a history of drink and thriftlessness—were dismissed with no illusions....
We went to the workhouse at the dinner hour. A comfortable place certainly, and the dinner probably better than a good many of the inmates had been accustomed to when they were earning their own living....
A pleasant hour with Mr. and Mrs. Crooks and their daughters at the castle, a stroll in the little garden which is Mrs. Crooks's delight, a short interview with Tommy the Tortoise, and it is time for the Member for Woolwich to start for Westminster and take his place in the National Assembly.
He takes up a leather case containing some sixty or seventy letters to be answered, and we go out into the street, which is happily bathed in sunshine. We get on the top of an omnibus, and I listen to the merry stories merrily told until we arrive at Aldgate Station and bid each other good-bye.
I have spent a most interesting and instructive morning with a typical Englishman, a man who has laboured with skill and used his brains as well as his hands to good purpose—a man who has fought his way up from boyhood, a man whose heart is as big as his shoulders are broad.
Beyond his sterling common sense and his sympathy with suffering, Will Crooks has one golden quality in a tribune of the people. He has a sense of humour. It does your eyes good to see him smile. And he has a laugh that makes you feel the sunshine even when the north wind blows.
Sometimes the Labour man has nearly a hundred letters a day to deal with. First attention is always given to those from people seeking counsel or help in Poplar and Woolwich.
An old man of ninety-four asks him to visit him for old times' sake. A widow has lost her property—will Mr. Crooks see her righted? A sick woman wants to know how she can get into a convalescent home. An anxious father asks him to speak to a wayward son, because "the lad sets such store by what you say, Mr. Crooks." Again, it is a distracted mother who writes, maybe about a son or a daughter who has run away or fallen into trouble.
Amusing letters come sometimes, varying the note of sorrow sounded in so many of the others. This, for instance, from a sympathetic Frenchman, who evidently imagines that a place called Poplar must be studded with trees of that name and surrounded by open fields. "I see," wrote this sympathiser from across the Channel, "that you are doing much for the unemployed, and I have pleasure in sending you enclosed cheque for them. I would suggest, in view of the importance of the poor children having pure milk, that the money be spent in putting unemployed men to work in cleaning out the ponds in the fields and lanes of Poplar where the cattle drink."
While Crooks is essentially a home-loving man, counting it one of his chief joys to have an evening free or a week-end to call his own, he regards it as a duty to speak at religious and temperance meetings, and on behalf of other movements not necessarily allied with the Labour Party.
One day finds him with the Bishop of London at the Mansion House meeting of the United Temperance Council. Another day he is speaking with the President of the Baptist Union, the Rev. John Wilson, one of his best supporters in Woolwich, at the Union's annual gathering. Another day he is congratulating Canon Hensley Henson, at the annual meeting of the London Wesleyan Mission, on having "six of his parishioners on the platform"—a reference to the presence of half a dozen members of Parliament, Canon Henson being rector of the House of Commons.
After addressing the Baptist Union on a second occasion, a letter came to him from the secretary, the Rev. J. H. Shakespeare:—
On behalf of the Council of the Baptist Union and on my own behalf I beg to thank you most warmly for the magnificent services you rendered to us last Tuesday night. It was delightful to hear you. I personally was very curious to see you managing a dense crowd of men. It does not seem to me that there is any reason why you should ever stop drawing from the rich and endless resources of your eloquence and wit and your wise sayings.
I feel very deeply indebted to you for having kept your engagement under such trying circumstances, and I hope you were not too fatigued afterwards.
A different letter was one from his old friend the Hon. and Rev. J. G. Adderley, announcing his call to Birmingham:—
Alas! I leave dear old London on November 2nd. Thank you for all you have been to me during my time here. I have known you now fifteen years.
The many occasions on which he addressed working men at adult Sunday schools in different parts of the country forced him to this conclusion, to which he gave public expression:—
The adult school movement has, I do sincerely believe, done more to make men understand that Brotherhood is not merely a word, but a real living thing, than any other movement of recent days. Men under the influence of adult schools now begin to see that their whole life on earth does not consist merely in eating, drinking, and working and going to a place of worship, but in taking a living part in God's work personally—in a word, in striving for some of Christ's ideals on earth as in Heaven.
He assisted at conducting something like an adult school in Poplar. Besides the Sunday morning meetings at the Dock Gates, the Labour League, in conjunction with the Rector of Poplar, carry on a winter series of addresses at the Town Hall on Sunday afternoons, to which Crooks and his friend, Mr. Fred Butler, give a good deal of their time. Of these Town Hall meetings he wrote in the article he contributed to the volume of essays on "Christianity and the Working Classes":—
The meetings are always crowded with working-men and their wives and working girls and lads. The rector or myself takes the chair—often we are both on the platform together. The gatherings are not religious in the orthodox sense, nor is any attempt made to teach religion, but I venture to say they have as much influence for good on the work-people of Poplar as many of the churches. We nearly always begin with music by singers or players who give their services, and then we have a "talk," generally by a public man, on social questions, on education, on books, and authors, and citizenship. Some of our speakers take Biblical subjects.
Thus every week we get together a good company of work-people who ordinarily attend no place of worship on Sunday; and if nothing more, we keep them out of the public-house, we make them think for themselves, we awaken some sense of citizenship. The presence of the rector has convinced many, who were formerly hostile to all parsons, Anglican and Nonconformist, that the Churches and Labour can work in harmony. Without pretending to be this, that, or the other, our gatherings have made for the love of one's neighbour, and therefore for the cause of Christ.
Nearly every P.S.A. and adult school and men's Sunday meeting in London wanted him. He would be at the Whitefield Tabernacle one Sunday, at the Leysian Mission another, at Dr. Clifford's church another.
The demands made upon him by temperance bodies redoubled after the introduction of the Licensing Bill of 1904, of which he was an uncompromising opponent. In nearly all his temperance addresses, full as they were of his humorous fancies, he denounced the practice, followed by so many temperance reformers, of making cheap jests at the men or women whom drink has degraded.
"We who can overcome temptation should be the last to make light of those who have failed to overcome temptation. Rather should we use our greater power to assist them."
What he said from public platforms he did not hesitate to repeat on the floor of the House of Commons. Speaking after Mr. Balfour, in one of the debates on the Licensing Bill, he said:—
"I wish to take the opportunity, while the Prime Minister is in the House, to say a few words on the question of temptation, because the impression left on my mind by the remarks of the right hon. gentleman is that every man who indulges in drink is capable of taking care of himself and of overcoming the drink habit by his own efforts. I hold that there are thousands of our fellow-men and women who cannot resist temptation when the opportunity to drink is put in their way. No doubt if everyone had the moral fibre of the Prime Minister there would be little need for a measure of temperance reform. Those hon. members who attend prayers at the opening of the proceedings of this House listen to the words, 'Lead us not into temptation.' I ask the Prime Minister whether he has ever thought that the thousands of people in our asylums through drink are there because they are capable of looking after themselves? No; it is because temptation has been too much for them. Does not that involve an obligation on the State to take temptation out of their way?"
The National Free Church Council invited him to address their annual gathering in 1906. The Council met in Birmingham in March, and the President (the Rev. J. Scott Lidgett), in introducing Crooks, said the invitation to him had not been given lightly. It was a deliberate recognition of the claim that Labour had upon the thought, energy, and prayer of the Free Churches. Then, turning to Crooks, he clasped his hand. "Thus," said the President, "Labour and the Free Churches are joined in their endeavour to solve some of the great human problems."
"The world," said Crooks in his opening remarks, "could be divided into two classes—some willing to work and the rest willing to let them." He went on to ask the representatives of the churches to put it out of their heads that the workman who did not go to a place of worship was a man utterly without religion. Such a man often had greater faith and more works to his credit than many regular worshippers.
Shortly afterwards the Free Church Council asked him to the banquet given at the Hotel Cecil in celebration of the return of nearly two hundred Free Churchmen to the House of Commons.
"You Free Churchmen," he said in his after-dinner speech, "have to come out of yourselves a great deal more in the future than you have in by-gone days. You cannot live for Sunday alone. You have to live for all the seven days of the week, and we expect you to come out and take a share of the work of social reorganisation. You are all of you, or the majority of you, a little bit ashamed of South Africa, and some of you wish you had got your tongues loose two or three years ago instead of now. You can imagine how I feel about this. A few of us at that time had to take our lives in our hands because we dared to say that that was a wicked war. Remember, the Empire does not consist in yelling about the Union Jack; the Empire begins in the workman's kitchen....
"I have been told plenty of times that our men and women are not God-fearing. Aren't they? I know the stories they tell you parsons sometimes; but down at the bottom of their hearts is a deep religious feeling which some of us would be better for having. Why can I always get the truth from the poor, who so often deceive you parsons? Why, because they feel I am a brother, and they have a doubt about you. You have got to wear that doubt off. You have got to make the humblest of our brothers and sisters understand that you do really care for them, that you intend to use the Parliamentary machine to abolish sweating and slumdom. We have got to promote industry in such a way that every honest worker may find useful work to do. We have to deal with the shirker whether he wears a top hat or hobnail boots."
Signs of Progress—a Crown Farm Cut Up into Small Holdings—The Colony Experiment at Laindon—How it was Killed by the Local Government Board—The Hollesley Bay Farm—A Minister for Labour Wanted.
After nearly twenty years of hard public service, Crooks saw some of the things for which he had striven so strenuously adopted as part of the policy of two successive Governments.
Woolwich re-elected him at the General Election with over nine thousand votes, some three or four hundred more than it gave him at the famous by-election three years before. He saw the new Government back up the Unemployed Act. He saw the Poor Law Commission at work. He saw the appointment of another Commission to consider the question of coast erosion and the reclamation of foreshores, which makes him believe there is still a chance for the scheme he laid before the Board of Trade in 1893.
Meanwhile, he believes he has done something practical in Parliament for the unemployed in another direction. He discovered that of the 70,000 acres of agricultural Crown lands, about 5,000 had been lying idle for many years. Thereupon he promptly reminded Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Government, in the early days of its first Session, that at the General Election they had talked about the need for colonising England. Here, he told the House, was a chance to give effect to the promise. Cut up the idle land into small holdings, and it would let at once. Make better use of the other land by dividing it into smaller farms. Further, why not try a scheme of afforestation on some portion of these Crown lands, which, after all, were the lands of the people?
He exacted a promise from the Government that the question of giving the Board of Agriculture some control of Crown lands, instead of leaving them in the hands of the Department of Woods and Forests, would be considered.
Something was done sooner than he expected. The President of the Local Government Board (Mr. John Burns) informed the House that a scheme of afforestation would be started on Crown lands the succeeding year. Moreover, Lord Carrington, whose encouragement of small holdings on his own estates Crooks had commended in the Commons, was added to the Commission of Woods and Forests in his capacity as President of the Board of Agriculture. A start was immediately made by cutting up into small parcels a Crown farm of 916 acres at Burwell in Cambridgeshire.
This quiet little reform Crooks hails as affording further means of solving the problem of unemployment.
"Whatever may be said to the contrary," is his way of putting it, "I maintain that even the town wastrel takes more kindly to the land than to anything else. Of course, I know that before he can be made of any use on the land he must be trained; but then it is well known that I favour farm colonies for training him."
Since he entered Parliament he had seen farm colonies for the unemployed become realities. His own Board of Guardians was the pioneer of the modern farm colony in this country. For nearly a dozen years the Guardians pleaded with the Local Government Board to be allowed to take a farm. Consent was at last obtained in 1903, when the Guardians had an offer of 100 acres at Laindon, in Essex, rent free for three years. The offer was made by Mr. Joseph Fels, a London manufacturer, who had been favourably impressed by a system he had seen in Philadelphia, whereby unemployed men were put to cultivate vacant land.
At first the Guardians' experiment was confined to able-bodied men from the workhouse. Its scope was widened with the coming of winter. The Poplar Unemployed Committee, which had the Mayor at its head and Crooks and Lansbury among its members, agreed on the suggestion of these latter to send a number of out-of-work men to this farm, meeting the expenses by a public appeal.
The need for giving out-of-work men proper training on the land was being urged at the same time by Mr. John Burns. That winter, as chairman of the Unemployed Conference called by the London County Council, Mr. Burns and Canon Escreet, the vice-chairman, signed a report urging that every opportunity should be taken to provide such training on the land as would fit the workers for efficient labour. The report went on:—
Efforts in this direction are already made in the case of emigrants to the Colonies, but it does not seem altogether reasonable that special efforts should be made which would have the effect of providing the colonies with specially trained labour if no efforts in this direction are made on behalf of the Home Country. It is not suggested that training for colonial life should not be provided, but merely that the needs of the United Kingdom should be equally borne in mind.
"I've seen wastrels," says Crooks, "who were going from bad to worse in our back streets in Poplar regain health and strength when sent to our farm at Laindon, and as they felt their muscles strengthening turn to work like men. I have seen many a decent unemployed man tided over hard times by being sent to work on our farm. The result of our first winter's experiment was that twenty-five of the men emigrated to Canada, the better for the training we had given them on the land. A dozen obtained work on their own account. And then, as the winter passed and trade got better, we began to discharge the men gradually. Over one hundred of the discharged men have never asked for relief from the Guardians since. If we had taken them into the workhouse at the time of their destitution, as the Poor Law prescribes, the greater part of them would have become permanent charges on the rates for the rest of their lives."
This promising experiment was killed by the Local Government Board. The Local Government Board refused to allow the farm to be continued except as a branch workhouse. Mr. Fels, at the end of the three years' trial, wrote to the Guardians:—
I desire to emphasise that my offer of the farm in the first instance was not for the purpose of establishing a branch workhouse, and in that way perpetuating stone yards, oakum picking, and corn grinding, and other useless tasks, which seems to be all the Local Government Board want to do.
On the contrary, I hoped that your Board would be allowed to try to re-establish men who were down on their luck. I never for one moment dreamed that your Board would be forced by the Local Government Board to keep 150 men on one hundred acres of land, it being obvious to me then, as now, that neither men nor staff could have a chance in such conditions. Although the Local Government Board has stifled this experiment, I am convinced that some such Poor Law reform is bound to come.
The Poplar experiment certainly satisfied Mr. Long when he was at the Local Government Board. He expressly stated, when suggesting the formation of his Central Unemployed Committee, that farm colonies represented one means by which the Committee could assist men out of work.
One of the first things the Committee did was to take the Hollesley Bay Farm, where both Crooks and Lansbury as active members of the Committee helped to develop the work. Mr. Fels again assisted, this time building a number of cottages with a view to drafting off some of the colonists into a position of independence, joined by their wives and families from London. The hope is entertained that some proportion of them may become small holders. Hollesley Bay Farm, which had been an agricultural training college for the sons of rich men going to the colonies, thus became a centre for training poor men to colonise their own country.
All these practical schemes for helping the unemployed and saving the cities from recurring periods of distress, which Crooks had done so much to set going, lend colour to his claim that the time has come for the addition to all future Cabinets of a new member to be styled the Minister for Labour. For nearly twenty years we have seen this labouring man, content with his three or four pounds a week, in a working-man's house in a working-man's neighbourhood, devising and carrying out social measures for the well-being of the nation that ought rightly to have come from the Government.
"The first thing a Labour Minister would do," he says, "would be to take over the Labour Department and other more or less allied departments of the Board of Trade. The present Labour returns of the Board of Trade are no good to anybody. I would have the Labour Minister obtain from all the local authorities a statement of what they regard as useful public works for their own districts. As soon as a spell of bad trade set in in any particular district our Minister of Industry would turn up the suggestions that had reached him from the affected quarter and make a national grant towards starting the local works.
"Then again I should leave to his Department rather than to the Local Government Board the duty of controlling farm colonies. I want to see the Government responsible for three separate kinds of labour colonies. First I want a farm colony for the habitual able-bodied pauper. He needs to have his muscles hardened and to be trained to work. The tasks set such a man in the workhouse are wasteful, and do him no good. You might have a combination of Poor Law Unions interested in such a colony. The second class of farm colony would be for habitual tramps. These men need to be kept entirely separate from able-bodied paupers. The third class would be voluntary colonies, to which unemployed men could be sent and trained in market gardening and farming.
"In fact, the practical work a Minister of Labour could do is endless. He could settle differences between masters and men before a strike was thought of. To him could be referred disputes as to machinery, questions as to safeguards, matters affecting hours, meal-times, overtime, and women's work. He would be the most useful Minister in the Cabinet."
Crooks's Poor Law Policy Attacked—How a Local Government Board Inquiry was Conducted—Crooks's Mistake in Remaining Chairman of the Board of Guardians—The Inspector's Report—Why the Poor Die rather than go to Poplar Workhouse.
It is easy to understand that the humane spirit Crooks had infused into Poor Law administration, and the fact of his having made the State recognise a duty to the unemployed, was not acceptable to the old order of Poor Law administrators, nor to some of the officials of the Local Government Board.
When Crooks entered upon Poor Law work he found it bound hand and foot by red tape. The men elected by the people did not rule at all. They were little more than the servants of paid officials, whether in the person of Bumble in the workhouse or of Bumble at the Local Government Board.
We have seen how he fought against Bumble administration, and how successive Presidents of the Local Government Board lent him their support. Mr. Ritchie, at the request of Poplar, reduced the qualification for Guardians. Sir Henry Fowler abolished it, and, again at Poplar's request, deprived workhouse masters of the power to refuse admission to Guardians. Mr. Henry Chaplin ordered "workhouse comforts" and "adequate out-relief." Mr. Walter Long improved the dietary scale and formed the Central Unemployed Committee. Mr. Gerald Balfour passed the Unemployed Act.
All these reforms were more or less unwelcome to Bumbledom. One can understand how impatiently those who stood for the old harsh order of things waited for an opportunity to break into revolt. Their opportunity came in June, 1906, at the Local Government Board Inquiry into Poplar's Poor Law administration.
Crooks, who was still Chairman, courted the fullest and most open investigation. Directly he heard that the Poplar Municipal Alliance was making charges against the Guardians to the Local Government Board, he appealed for a public Inquiry.
On the opening day of the public Inquiry at Poplar Crooks and his colleague George Lansbury felt it to be their duty to protest against its being conducted by an Inspector who, they alleged, had his verdict in his pocket. They wished to make no reflection upon the Inspector's personal integrity, but they declared then and afterwards that it appeared to them to be "quite unjust to appoint so extreme an opponent of their policy to conduct the inquiry."
For fifteen out of the twenty days that the inquiry lasted the Inspector allowed the Municipal Alliance practically to direct the proceedings. They did their best to discredit Crooks's Poor Law policy on account of the malpractices of some of his colleagues, of which, up to then, owing to the pressure of his other public duties, he had been ignorant.
The Inspector, whose knowledge might have taught him how far from true many of the innuendoes were, made no attempt to stop them. He appeared to think it quite right to allow statements to go forth to the public that paupers were being fed on all kinds of delicacies, and that serviettes, pocket handkerchiefs, and outfits for girls going to service were for the use of the ordinary inmates of the workhouse.
The public did not know at the time that the "Linen Collars for Workhouse Inmates," blazoned forth in the Press as an example of Poplar's extravagance, were simply what were supplied to the boys in the school, that they too, like the girls, might go out into the world no longer branded, but self-respecting.
All through the Inquiry the public was given to understand that Poplar was an example of what happens under Labour administration. Since the two most prominent Guardians, Crooks and Lansbury, were known everywhere as Labour leaders, the whole Board was wrongly supposed to consist of their followers. In reality, out of a Board of twenty-four members only ten were Labour representatives, and not half of these Socialists. The majority of the Guardians were Conservatives and Liberals.
The policy of Crooks and Lansbury did to a large extent dominate the Board, due no doubt to their ability and personal magnetism. But between the policy of these two men and the administration of certain of their colleagues lay a gulf that neither the Inspector nor the Press seemed to see at the time. These two were held responsible for certain faults of administration committed by individual members of the Board belonging to the Liberal and Conservative parties. They were actually held up to reproach and ridicule for faults and follies committed by colleagues who had bitterly opposed their policy at every step.
The Inquiry taught Crooks his mistake in consenting to remain Chairman of the Board after his election to Parliament. We have seen that his consent to remain was given reluctantly, and on the understanding that he should devote less time to the work. He little thought that some of those who pressed him to stay would take advantage of his relaxed attention to bring discredit on the Board's administration. He therefore seized an early opportunity in the succeeding year of resigning the office, informing the Board by word of mouth, and the people of Poplar by circular letter, that in doing so, owing to the press of other public duties, he did not propose to abandon in the smallest way any part of that policy of Poor Law reform to which the best years of his public life had been devoted. He also publicly declared in Poplar repeatedly that he would do his best to expose and turn out of public life any person guilty of corruption, and even while the Inquiry was going on he appealed to the Inspector more than once to order a prosecution of suspected Guardians and contractors.
After the dust and din caused by the Municipal Alliance had died down, that body found itself largely discredited in Poplar. One of its members wrote to the Press:—
Over this Inquiry we have already made many enemies.... It would be difficult to define what the Alliance set out to do, but the methods employed in doing it were, to say the least, unworthy....
I did not think, when we embarked on this expensive trip, that we were going to attempt to cover with ridicule men who, it must be admitted, have devoted a considerable portion of their time to the affairs of the Union, and are now proved to have been thoroughly honest in their policy.
The Alliance was to receive a heavier blow from the Poplar people. To them an insult to Crooks was an insult to Poplar. The Borough Council Elections followed soon after the Inquiry, the Alliance throwing all its weight into the local campaign. In nearly all the other London boroughs the Progressives and Labour men were badly beaten. In Poplar the Labour Party went back larger in numbers and backed by a stronger vote of the electors than they had ever had before. Lansbury defeated the Chairman of the Alliance.
"That," said Crooks at the time, in an interview in one of the daily papers, "is the answer of the people of Poplar to the slanders and misrepresentations levelled against me. The people of Poplar know the truth about my policy, whatever may have been the shortcomings of some of my colleagues; the people of London do not know—they only have the Yellow Press version."
Again, when a few weeks later the triennial election for the London County Council took place, the people of Poplar stood by their Labour member. Progressive and Labour seats fell all over London in March, 1907, but Crooks was re-elected for Poplar at the top of the poll with 3,504 votes, though the Alliance strained every nerve to oust him.
Then it was that his outside accusers began to suspect they had been misled. Here was a prophet in his own country indeed—accused and slandered outside, but trusted and honoured by his neighbours. And when a month later the election of Guardians took place, and Poplar, put to a third test, declared more emphatically than ever for the Crooks policy by defeating about two-thirds of the Alliance candidates and electing an increased number of Labour men, the eyes of the public were opened.
But the revival of Bumbledom was not yet at an end. The Local Government Board Inspector's report came out three and a half months after the inquiry closed. The unusual course was followed of publishing it before the evidence. When the evidence did appear it disproved many of the Inspector's conclusions.
The Inspector was bound to say there was no reflection upon the "personal integrity of Mr. Crooks and Mr. Lansbury."
While deprecating the standard of comfort in the workhouse, the Inspector made no reference to the doctor's statement that he did not think the inmates were too well fed or clad. Rather, he tried to undermine Crooks's policy by remarks of this kind:—
Mr. Crooks in his evidence admitted that the dietary in the workhouse was better than could be obtained by the independent labourer in the borough with a wife and two children to keep who received anything under 30s. a week.
The evidence gives a different version. What Crooks said (page 389) was:—
"A man with 30s. a week with a wife and two children can only just keep himself in decency. When he gets below that he gets below the Local Government Board diet.... The men in the workhouse get a bare subsistence, and no man outside ought to be paid wages less than enable him to get that kind of living. What you have to prove is that we are giving the people in the workhouse such luxury as a man in ordinary work at from thirty to forty shillings a week could not get at home. But what he" [the legal representative of the Municipal Alliance] "does not say is that we are dealing with the very aged in the workhouse—the able-bodied, as you know, are exceedingly limited in number—but he does not appreciate for a moment that after all a man's liberty is worth something. Liberty has not fallen in value. It is a priceless something. A man will die for it. And our people will die—a good many of them—rather than go into the workhouse."
It happened that the people of Poplar were dying for it about that very time. While the Local Government Board was harassing Crooks for his efforts to save the poor from starvation, another Department of the State was in correspondence with the Guardians over two cases of people who had died from starvation in Poplar. This was the Home Office.
It is a theory of the British Constitution that no person in the kingdom should die of starvation. Yet in London alone forty-eight people died of starvation in the winter of 1905-6. Whitechapel, which gives no out-relief, and is held up as a model by the Inspector who conducted the Poplar inquiry, had ten deaths from starvation within its borders during the year. Poplar, where the Guardians are said to be too generous in their treatment of the poor, was unable, with all its zeal, to prevent two people dying from want of food.
One of the victims was a child whose father refused to go into Poplar workhouse—this so-called "palace of luxury"—because he thought he might still be able to earn a trifle outside. Out-relief in the way of food was given to the value of 3s. 6d. a week, but that not being enough for a family of five, the youngest defied the British Constitution by quietly slipping into the grave—"Died of asthenia and bronchitis," was the coroner's verdict, "due to mother's want of food, accelerated by want of proper clothing."
Shortly afterwards a married labourer in Old Ford, faced with starvation, refused to apply to the Poplar Guardians because it had become common talk among the poor of the district that the Local Government Board would no longer allow the Guardians to assist people outside the workhouse. And one morning this unemployed man had to run to the nearest doctor's because one of his children was "took queer." What followed was told by the doctor in evidence a few days later at the Poplar Coroner's Court. He related how he was knocked up in the early morning, and how, when he went to the house, he found no sign of food, no fire, and, lying on some scanty bedding, a girl-child, who had been dead about an hour. Death, he added, was due to exhaustion from want of sufficient food. He was so shocked with the poverty of the home that he gave the parents five shillings out of his own pocket, and sent them something to eat.
Crooks Appeals to the Public—"This Insult to the Poor"—Resentment all over the Country—A Voice from the Hungry 'Forties—Cheering Letters—A Government Department's Blunder—Poplar's Appeal to Crooks.
The day after the report of the Local Government Board Inspector was published, Crooks sent his decision upon it to the Press. He wrote from the House of Commons, where, as he stated in his letter, "the unfairness and injustice of the report in its bearings on my Poor Law policy are so far recognised that to-day I have been told by members of all parties that the report is not only wicked but brutal." He further stated in his letter to the Press:—
"Will you permit me to make it public through your columns that I accept the challenge thrown down in the Local Government Board report? Against all its strictures I intend to maintain my stand on that policy of humanising the Poor Law, to which I have given the greater part of my life. And in doing so I propose to appeal from the Local Government Board to the public.
"If the public upholds this insult to the poor I shall be painfully surprised. After twenty days of a searching inquiry, and after twice twenty pages of a strained attack on Mr. Lansbury and myself, there is nothing to show that we have done anything against the actual orders and regulations of the very Board that now rises in mock-heroic wrath to slay us. Our only crime is that we have humanised a system framed in 1834, when the voteless working classes were dragooned by a middle-class majority....
"My present duty is clear. The public may remember that at Mr. Chaplin's request I went as a nominee of the Local Government Board on the Metropolitan Asylums Board. It may remember that I was co-opted on the Central Unemployed Body on the suggestion of Mr. Walter Long. Now that the Local Government Board, under the new Government, has seen fit to attack me and my Labour colleagues, and to flout the poor as I venture to say they have never been flouted by that Department before, I can no longer hold those two positions. I propose to resign. Nor until its attitude towards the poor and the unemployed changes will I ever consent to represent the Local Government Board on any public body again. I prefer to represent the people....
"The faults of administration at Poplar, so grossly magnified in this report, are common to all such bodies, and Poplar will do its best to avoid them. But the policy will not change. By that we stand or fall."
The reason for that policy was briefly explained in a special report issued by the Poplar Guardians and signed by Crooks as Chairman. It formed part of the Board's reply to the Inspector's report. Thus:—
This policy was never put in force with the idea that it would lead to a reduction in rates or in the number applying for relief. No one imagines that decent treatment of the poor will choke off applicants in the manner that harsh treatment will, but we claim that under the Act of Elizabeth, the poor (not merely the destitute, but the poor) are entitled to come to society in time of need.
The State provides all kinds of services for the community, such as roads, sewers, light, police, army, navy, education, etc., and we all enjoy those privileges. The State pensions its well-paid Cabinet Ministers and officials; and we claim that the poor, whose charter is the 43rd of Elizabeth, instead of being penalised when needing help, should receive such help in an ungrudging measure and in a manner which would most effectively preserve their self-respect.
Finally, we would again repeat that our pauperism is due to our poverty, that our policy is based on the claims recognised by statute as the due right of the poor. We neither palliate nor excuse any lapses either on the part of members or officers of the Board, but we claim that as a Board we have carried out our duties as efficiently and as economically as we were able, that we have never given indiscriminate relief either in or out of the workhouse, and in the main have usefully tried to do our duty both to the poor, who have our first claim, and to the ratepayers.
We have never ceased to urge for the past ten years that the poor are a metropolitan charge, that unemployment is a national question, that the Poor Law should be reformed. We are glad to know that our work, despite this present attack, has been successful, and that the poor of Poplar are better cared for, and not only the poor of Poplar, but the poor of the United Kingdom generally, as a result of our effort.
His appeal to the public won an inspiring response. Bumbledom was against him, but the people were with him. While a section of the Press was attacking him, it was so far ignorant of what the people of England were thinking as to know nothing at all of the tremendous meetings he was addressing all over the country.
His meetings in Poplar and Woolwich, where he was supported with rousing enthusiasm, were the largest he had ever had in those boroughs. At Chesterfield he addressed an open-air meeting of nearly twenty thousand Midland miners, when his reference to his Poor Law policy was cheered to the echo. The Cleveland miners were equally enthusiastic when he went up to their annual gathering. It was the same at public meetings in Newcastle, Burton, Huddersfield, Rossendale, Stockport, Batley, Sunderland, Penarth—the man who had stood out against one of Bumbledom's fiercest onslaughts had the good-will and confidence of the working people of England. At his indoor meetings there were rarely fewer than two thousand people present. Often he had audiences of four and five thousand.
It looked as though a recurrence of his old illness would prevent him from keeping an appointment to speak on his Poor Law policy at Bradford. Such was the strength of the appeal sent to him, however, that he determined to risk it. He had to be helped by his wife on the journey, and when at the meeting it was found he was unable to stand there was a unanimous call that he be allowed to keep his chair while speaking. Seated in the middle of the platform, he held an audience of two or three thousand people for upwards of an hour. The response he wrung from the crowded hall moved him deeply. Bumbledom never had a worse hour.
Of course his first public meeting after the publication of the Local Government Board's report took place at the Dock Gates in Poplar.
"We never had a better meeting," he wrote to me the next day. "The audience backed me to a man and woman—and, by the way, we never had so many women present before. It did me good."
At some of his provincial meetings there were people who well-nigh worshipped him. Old men in particular who had known the Hungry 'Forties would come up to him after the meeting and say:—
"Let me shake you by the hand, Mr. Crooks. We read about it in the papers, but the papers don't understand. We've been through it, and know. Don't be down-hearted, Mr. Crooks. God bless you!"
At a small country town a bed had been reserved for him at the little hotel outside the railway station. He arrived about midnight, and found the place in darkness. He knocked loudly for some time. At last a man's voice was heard from the railway line.
"Is that Mr. Crooks? Lord love yer, we knew you'd be late, and gone again early in the morning, and so that I shouldn't miss seeing you I told the hotel-keeper to go to bed and let me have the keys, so that you couldn't get in without me shaking you by the hand."
His first public meeting in Woolwich after the Local Government Board Inquiry drew an audience of over five thousand people to the Drill Hall. His colleague Lansbury shared in the inspiring reception and addressed the meeting.
Crooks told the audience it was no wonder that Lansbury and he got angry at times over our iniquitous Poor Law system. Such was the injustice of the rating system in London that Poplar—which was spending out of the rates per head of population less than half what West-End districts like Kensington and Marylebone were spending—appeared to outsiders to be extravagant. If those West-End Boroughs had Poplar's poor to look after, their rates, instead of being about 7s., would be about 15s. in the pound. The poor of Poplar were London's poor; yet the cost of looking after them was borne mainly by the people of Poplar. London was the only city in the world where those who grew rich on the labour of the poor were able to segregate themselves in favoured quarters, and escape their obligation to help the aged poor unable to work longer.
He went on to show the iniquities of our Poor Law system from a national standpoint. About £28,000,000 a year was raised in the name of the Poor Law. Of this only £14,000,000 had any connection with the Poor Law at all. And how were the fourteen millions spent? The poor got seven and a half millions, while the remaining six and a half millions were spent in administrative charges. That meant that every 5s. given to the poor out of the rates cost the ratepayers another 4s. 9d. to give it. No wonder that Bumbledom became nervous when Guardians urged that the poor rather than officials should receive more of this money raised for the poor. The Local Government Board Inspector, when deploring that Poplar's expenditure on the poor had gone up during the last ten years, might have added that during the same period the cost of collecting rates in the City had gone up from £11,000 to £23,000. It seemed to be all right when officials got the money, but all wrong when the poor got it.
"I believe in being a true Guardian of the poor, and not merely a Guardian of the Poor Rate. We in Poplar have preferred to save the lives of the poor rather than the rates. Even then we have administered with remarkable economy; for Poplar's rates would not be high if London as a whole paid its proper share towards maintaining London's poor. We in Poplar, however, have not allowed an unjust rating system to prevent us from doing our duty to broken-down old people, to the starving and to the unemployed. We agree with Carlyle that 'to believe practically, that the poor and luckless are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith. To say to the poor: Ye shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the water of affliction and be very miserable while here, requires not so much a stretch of heroic faculty in any sense as due toughness of bowels.'"
From Stockport, where he had been addressing one of a series of public meetings in the Midlands, he wrote:—