Great Britain. Royal Commission on Poor Laws and Relief of Distress; Poor -- Great Britain; Poor laws -- Great Britain
Sanatoria for phthisis patients, and of Rescue Homes for girl mothers,
in so far as undertaken at the public expense, must be the work of the
new Poor Law Authorities.[848] It is part of the same idea to insist on
the importance of there being established a single "Public Assistance
Service ... which should include all officers concerned with the
supervision control and disciplinary treatment of the poor ... not only
the ... relieving officers both male and female" but also "masters,
matrons, and superintendents of institutions of every grade," whether
for the children, the sick, or the able-bodied unemployed. All these
officers, whatever their technical duties, are to have a certain common
training, to receive certificates of different grades, to enjoy
opportunities of promotion from one post to another, and to be made to
realise, throughout their whole service, that they are "concerned with
the moral training of those committed to their care."[849] Thus, all the
various specialised institutions, which are to replace the General Mixed
Workhouse--the nursery, the residential school, the hospital, the
dispensary, the "industrial institution" for the able-bodied, the Rescue
Home for girl mothers, the phthisis sanatorium and the home for the
helpless aged--are to be administered by officers of a single
homogeneous interchangeable service, deliberately focusing their
attention on the moral accompaniments assumed to be characteristic of
destitute persons as such, whether these are children or adults, sick or
whole. "From the point of view thus indicated," explains an
authoritative exponent of the Majority Report, "there is, as it were, an
army of social healers to be trained and organised; and it is like the
army of war in the fundamental fact that it is to be disciplined and
animated with a single spirit and purpose, however varied and
specialised may be the duties that fall within its range. The whole of
these proposals are founded on the conviction that there is a problem
common and peculiar to the entire range of destitution or
necessitousness, demanding a common and peculiar method of dealing with
it."[850] This, indeed, is the fundamental difference between the Majority
Report and the Minority Report. "The antagonism," continues this
exponent, "cannot be put too strongly. The Majority proceed upon the
principle that where there is a failure of social self-maintenance in
the sense above defined, there is a defect in the citizen character, or
at least a grave danger to its integrity; and that, therefore, every
case of this kind raises a problem which is 'moral' in the sense of
affecting the whole capacity of self-management, to begin with in the
person who has failed, and secondarily in the whole community so far as
influenced by expectation and example."[851]
[847] Par. 609 of Part VI. of the Majority Report.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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