62 ENGLISHSAGA

comfort. It had formerly been regarded as part of the duty of
society to ensure at the expense of its principal beneficiaries a
"fair wage" to every Englishman willing to labour. But a
cold and alien philosophy now ruled the conduct of those
in power. A Realm of England that denied the validity of its
own authority announced that it could no longer help the People
of England to preserve their traditional rights and status. Those
who were submerged in the factory towns responded by forgetting
that they had any-part in the tradition of the realm. There was
nothing to remind them that they had.

The new spirit informed the Poor Law which was enacted in
1834 to remedy the disastrous effects of the well-intentioned but
makeshift system—known as Speenhamland—of subsidising
wages out of rates. It bore the cold impress of the mathematical
mind. It was based on the principle that the smaller the burden
placed by the relief of poverty on the taxpayer the greater the
country's wealth. Itself a contradication of the strict letter of
that economic law, it adhered as closely to it as was compatible
with the traditional and obstinate English dislike of allowing
a man to die of hunger. Outdoor relief, with all its kindly
charities, was sternly discouraged: in its place the Workhouse,
built with sombre economy by the administrative Unions of
parishes formed under the new Act, offered to the needy poor
the maximum of deterrent with the minimum of subsistence.

It was-this austere form of charity that was doled out to the
dispossessed weaver, the hungry handcraftsman deprived of his
employment and the agricultural labourer who had simul-
taneously lost his grazing rights on the common and the
supplementary earnings of the traditional home industries
which the machines had destroyed. To men and women nursed
in a kindlier tradition it seemed an outrage that old folk who
had laboured all their lives and had become destitute through
no fault of their own should be torn from their homes, separated
from each other's company and herded in sexes into prison-like
institutions,

For the economists did not see Labour as a body of men and
women with individual needs and rights but only as a statistical
abstraction. Labour was a commodity of value on which the
man of Capital, with whom all initiative lay, could draw as the
state of the market demanded. And as that market—a world
one—was at the mercy of accident and fluctuated unpredictably,