The Smith family, it is true, has been kept from the workhouse—at the cost, not improbably, of some weakly little Smith’s life—but has not this result been bought too dear? Do not justice and good sense alike suggest the unfitness of leaving the burden of maintaining the Smith family to rest upon precisely that class of the community which is least able to support it? The maintenance of those who cannot maintain themselves by those who can barely maintain themselves keeps both groups upon a dead level of destitution. If our aim is really the strengthening of the people we must not begin by increasing the burdens of the weakest—burdens borne often at so cruel a sacrifice of health and life, and with so amazing an absence of complaint. The Smith family and the Brown family alike are suffering because their income is barely adequate to their elementary current needs; and their troubles will only be cured by the possession of a larger real income. This, indeed, Mrs Bosanquet sees plainly enough. “How can we bring it about,” she asks, “that they” (_i.e._ “those whom we may call the very poor”) “shall have a permanently greater command over the necessaries and luxuries of life?” Gifts she perceives to be no true remedy, though she fails to assign the economic reason, which is that the possession of outside resources enables the recipient to “go one lower” than his unendowed competitor in the battle for employment. The same objection does not apply to the workhouse, which withdraws the pauper from the battle altogether, but it does apply to outdoor relief, and is the one valid economic argument against it. The best charity—as Dr Johnson long ago pointed out—indeed, the only effectual charity, is to set a man to work at good wages. This is not, however, Mrs Bosanquet’s plan. “The less obvious, but more effective remedy is to approach the problem by striking at its roots in the minds of the people themselves; to stimulate their energies, to insist upon their responsibilities, to train their faculties. In short, to make them efficient.”[65] Unfortunately the ill-nourished, ill clothed and ill taught cannot be made efficient. Moreover if we could make every one of them efficient, they would be no better off, financially in their efficient state than they are now, in their incompetence.[66] While rare, efficiency, like a tenor voice, commands a monopoly price; if universal, its money worth would be no higher than that of the ability to read, which in the Middle Ages was a commercial asset of value. Furthermore, since extreme poverty destroys efficiency, these ill paid efficient persons would presently become, like our poorer manual labourers of to-day, weak of brain and of body, dull, languid, inert and therefore bad workers.