Great Britain. Royal Commission on Poor Laws and Relief of Distress; Poor -- Great Britain; Poor laws -- Great Britain
With this clue to their meaning, it becomes possible to understand the
main constructive proposals of the Majority Commissioners. The most
distinctive feature of these proposals, as well as the most novel, is
the setting up in every district, side by side, of two separate
organisations for the assistance of the poor; one to deal with one set
of people and the other with another set; one, the "Public Assistance
Authority," to administer the Poor Law, at the expense of the rates,
whilst the other, the Voluntary Aid Committee, to carry out the desires
of the charitable, mainly out of private funds.[853] This proposal is,
in our judgment, a bold attempt to get back the "Principles of 1834" in
all their austerity. From the writings of Chadwick and Nassau Senior
down to the latest pronouncements of the Charity Organisation Society,
it has always been held that any Poor Law administration according to
the "Principles of 1834," involved the co-existence of voluntary charity
sufficiently well-organised to prevent the deserving person from falling
under the deterrent conditions of the Poor Law, and from being subject
to the stigma of pauperism. According to this view, which received the
endorsement of Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen's celebrated Minute of
1870, the public assistance of the Poor Law Authority is _designed and
intended only for the undeserving_, it being assumed that those worthy
of anything better than the Poor Law supplied ought to be provided for
by organised charity. When we find the Majority Report explicitly
"accepting the principle of Mr. Goschen's Minute";[854] setting up in
every district a Voluntary Aid Committee to carry out this principle;
definitely recommending that rules should be made _requiring_ certain
classes of applicants to apply to the Voluntary Aid Committee, and
certain others to the public Authority, whether the applicants like it
or not;[855] and expressly stipulating that the treatment provided by
the latter is to be "less eligible" than that which the former may be
pleased to prescribe,[856] we cannot help feeling that the policy of the
future "Public Assistance Authority" is, after all, to be the Poor Law
of 1834, dealing only (as is assumed) with the worthless and the
undeserving whom the charitable have, because of their character,
refused to aid, and to whom the New Poor Law is to extend only "less
eligible" treatment.[857] If the new Public Assistance Authorities are
really intended to proceed on "curative and restorative" principles, and
"to widen, strengthen, and humanise the Poor Law," why is so much stress
laid on Mr. Goschen's Minute (which was based on a "deterrent" and
"negative" Poor Law), and why is it so important to rescue, by means of
a Voluntary Aid Committee, all the deserving cases from the clutches of
the Public Assistance Authority? If the treatment applied by the Public
Assistance Authority is really to be that calculated to be what is most
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