Penury Not Pauperism

DR. CHALMERS believed that modern society without pauperism, though not without penury, was attainable in any community. He conceived that this persuasion had been proved under adverse circumstances by his experience during his residence in Glasgow. What that was, and how he vindicated it, are therefore matters of living interest.

Chalmers’s economy may fairly be traced to his observations among the peasantry of his first parish in Fifeshire. He passed the first twelve years of his pastoral life among the seven hundred and fifty souls of Kilmany, and the impressions there gathered, when collated from his writings, add new attractions to the picture of lowly Scottish life presented in Burns’s Cotter’s Saturday Night. In the “lonely cot,” the sire sits by the “ ingle, blinkin bonnily,” holding in his lap “ the big ha’ Bible, ance his father’s pride.” Near him is “ the thriftie wife,” quieting the “ expectant wee-things.” But in the circle there is, too, the honored grandfather, whose declining age it would be impious to remand to the almshouse. Perchance the barefoot stranger is present, also, having risen from the evening meal of porridge, perhaps “ kitchened,” to use a dialectic phrase, with a bit of cheese or coarse meat. While the bunk, prepared like Elijah’s chamber for unexpected visitors, awaits him, he joins the “ priestlike father” as he “ wales a portion ” of “plaintive Martyrs,” or “ Dundee’s wild warbling measures.”Jenny has been busy with the “providing ” for her wedding-day, which anticipates all household wants, even to the shroud which is to envelop her at last. It may be that the clever boy who is sustained at St. Andrew’s or Aberdeen by the contributions of father and sister, added to vacation earnings, joins the group, with the elder bairns home from “ service out, amang the farmers roun’.”

This household, whose bread-winner’s labor is often recompensed with a peck of meal a day, whose children wear shoes only on the “ Sabbath,” not only maintains the aged grandsire and has a barrel of meal for the wants of the wayfarer, but keeps the “ younkers ” at the parish school, and reserves something for the kirk and ha’pence for the poorcollection. Said a woman from such a family, when offered aid in her distress from the parish funds, “ I would not have the name of it for the worth of it.” Here is penury, but not pauperism. Stem frugality is sentinel over such worthy independence.

Chalmers set himself to bring this “ pure and patriarchal economy of the olden time forth again in the might of its wonted ascendency over all the habits of all the population.” In these compendious terms he explains his aims. In his view, such life was threatened with extirpation by an artificial scheme. He regarded the English poor-law system as a direct cause of the ills it professed to alleviate. “ It is indeed,” he observes before the General Assembly, “a noble testimony to the ancients and councilors who have gone before us that in the practical wisdom of our Scottish Kirk there lies a secret which has baffled the whole political economy of our English Parliament; and that, while the legislature of our empire are now standing helpless and aghast at the sight of that sore leprosy which hath spread itself over their ten thousand parishes, the country in which we live, healthful and strong in the yet unbroken habits of her peasantry, might, by the pure force of her moral and religious institutions, have kept herself untainted altogether, and is still able to retrace her footsteps, and to shake the pestilence from all her borders.”

On Dr. Chalmers’s arrival in Glasgow he found the essential features of compulsory relief already rooted in the city proper, and rapidly encroaching on its populous suburbs. Hence, when be applied his theories of social economy to a district the management of which he had secured to himself, he called his experiment a “retracing process,” or an effort to return from a highly artificial scheme to “ the natural sufficiency ” of society. And the practical significance of his ministry at St. John’s lies in an exhibition of the steps whereby a community, disordered and polluted by the principles as well as by the expedients of compulsory relief, may recover the play of spontaneous sympathy between man and man, and replace official mechanisms with the offices of personal kindness.

The conditions under which this “ retracing ” experiment was undertaken were apparently highly unfavorable. The country was undergoing an industrial revolution, brought about by rapid inventions of labor-saving machinery,— a revolution not yet fairly estimated in social effects. In the anguish caused by unceasing dislocations of the people, and the consequent invasions of their habits, the artisan classes were easily persuaded, not only by political charlatans, but by the approbation of many thoughtful and influential persons, that their miseries were traceable to the unwise exercise of the powers of government. As a consequence, the land from the Thames to the Clyde was seething with tumult.

Glasgow, with Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester, was conspicuous for its restlessness and sedition. Night after night men in motley arms drilled in suburban fields. People assembled by the tens of thousands to discuss their wrongs ; suspected leaders were tracked to taverns and lofts by detectives. One morning in April of l820, the inhabitants of Lanarkshire, from Lanark to Sterling, from Glasgow to Paisley, read on the dead walls the summons of an anonymous government to close the factories, and to gather from the deserted forge and loom to establish by decree the reforms which Parliament denied. Strangely enough, this mandate was obeyed, and two hundred thousand persons, suddenly deprived of employment, thronged the streets, to discuss in sullenness or impatience the prospects of revolution. So grave was the situation that guards of yeomen, officered by the young gentry, rode into town and garrisoned the Town Hall, and loaded artillery rumbled down High Street and formed on the New Embankments and at the Royal Exchange, to command the city. Special officers of the government came down from London for the emergency.

The condition of the people was deplorable. Wages had receded to half rates, and at times thousands of looms were silent. The furniture of many a tenement was reduced to deal-boxes. The distress was aggravated by the rapidly advancing commercial supremacy of Glasgow over Scotland. The pulsations of the Royal Exchange throbbed to the Highlands, and the clans sent down their youth to give up their plaids for the blouse of the operative. The “ elder bairns ” forsook the service of the “ farmers roun’ ” for the looms and forges of the distant city. The crofters melted away before gangs of men who issued from the cities to till the fields and lodge in bothies, and harvests were gathered by promiscuous companies of lads and maids who came from and returned to town each day. Methods of husbandry and manufacture were silently changing, and the transition was marked by engorged towns and depleted fields. The wretched population clamored for public assistance, persuaded that it was their right; and their half-communistic agitations were the logical precursors of the Chartism which within a generation convulsed the realm.

“ The condition of Glasgow,” Dr. Chalmers urged before a parliamentary commission, “ was perhaps the worst that ever occurred. It was at the time that radicalism was at its height, and this radicalism had taken the unfortunate and alarming direction of insisting upon the English law of parochial aid being introduced and acted upon all over the city.” It was a radicalism which penetrated to Kirk Sessions, to civic councils, and to the opinions of influential personages. It was aggressive, and, to use Chalmers’s words, “ a perpetual controversy was ever and anon springing up in some new quarter, so as to surround my enterprise with a menace and hostility from without that was at least very disquieting.”

The especial terms of the problem confronting Dr. Chalmers may now be briefly reviewed. Two systems of poorrelief existed, side by side, in Glasgow, the voluntary and the compulsory. The voluntary system was that of the Kirk, which drew its resources from what was called the church-door collection, because it was taken up usually as the congregation left the edifice at close of service, though it was sometimes gathered before the benediction in a bag at the end of a stick, called a “ ladle.” These alms were distributed by the Kirk Session to its own enrolled poor.

The legal or compulsory system was confined, notwithstanding royal injunctions, to about one hundred and forty parishes, chiefly in the manufacturing districts and those contiguous to England. Under the old law of 1579, the provosts and bailies of each burgh or incorporated town were required to make inquest for the “aged, impotent, and pure people; ” to register them in a “ buike to raise by assessment and to disburse the necessary funds for their relief. In Glasgow this system had passed into the control of the Town Hospital, as it was called, which was quite as much a board of administration as an institution, and it had charge of out and in door relief.

The practice of the Kirk Sessions in the city had been to pour the churchdoor collections of all the eight parishes into a common treasury, and then to allot to each session a sum proportioned to the number of its enrolled poor. The object, of this rather cumbrous plan was to make wealthy congregations bear the unequal burdens of the poorer ones, but it also engendered a feeling hostile to the independent action of any parish.

Whenever the sessions wished to relinquish the care of a pauper they had behind them the Town Hospital, the resources of which were limited only by the courage of the assessors, and which was under legal obligations to assume the relief of the destitute. A rejected applicant, if he had means to maintain a suit in court, might force the Town Hospital to answer for its denial of aid.

The relation of the two systems is thus described by Chalmers : “ The sessions, in fact, were the feeders or conductors by which the Town Hospital received its pauperism, that, after lingering a while on this path of conveyance, was impelled onward to the farther extremity, and was at length thrust into the bosom of the wealthier institution by the pressure that constantly accumulated behind it.”

Dr. Chalmers became acquainted with the customs of Glasgow when he went to his first charge in that city, known as the Tron Church. His excursions through the parish were beset with a sordid blandiloquence, no less easily penetrated than it was firmly believed by its practitioners to be a complete disguise of their character. “ I remember,” he wrote, “ I could scarcely make my way to the bottom of a close in Salt Market, I was so exceedingly thronged with people. But I soon perceived that this was in consequence of my imagined influence in the distribution of charities.”

Chagrined with this experience, he determined to end it. “ I soon made the people understand,” said he, “ that I only dealt in one article, — that of Christian instruction, — and that if they chose to receive me on that footing I should be glad to receive them occasionally. I can vouch for it,” he continues, “ that the cordiality of the people was not only enhanced, but very much refined in principle, after this became the general understanding.” For four years Chalmers held aloof from the management of the pauperism of Glasgow in all its phases. Then the new parish of St. John’s was formed, in a rapidly growing eastern suburb, and he was presented to it. “ My great inducement,” he affirms, “ to the acceptance of that parish was my hope thereby to obtain a separate and independent management of the poor.” To carry out his purpose, he had to win over eight reluctant parishes, united by a common poor-treasury, to secure the consent of the magistrates, and to allay the opposition of the Town Hospital. These preliminaries over, his opponents cited him before the Presbytery, and thence before the General Assembly, to defend the innovation of restoring the ancient Kirk custom. But in 1819 Dr. Chalmers took charge of St. John’s, with the unhampered management of its poor.

His aim was radical indeed. If he could realize his ideal, he would have no artificial organization for relief. His own testimony is, “ I must not disguise my conviction that, apart from the support of education and of institutions for disease, public charity in any form is an evil, and that the Scottish method is only to be tolerated because of its insignificance and the rooted establishment which it hath gotten in all our parishes ; but though I would tolerate it in practice, I cannot defend it in principle.”

To accomplish his plans Chalmers adopted the following expedients: The morning collection was withdrawn from the general treasury of the churches. It amounted to about £400 a year, and of this £245 were already allotted to the sessional poor enrolled in St.John’s parish. In consideration of the £155 surplus, he agreed to send no paupers whatever to the Town Hospital, although the legal assessment for the support of that institution was still enforced in his district. In a few months he even assumed the support of the town paupers who had been admitted at former times from St. John’s territory. The morning collection was administered by the Kirk Session, as of old, save that no new admissions were to be made to its benefits. The calculation was that the old race of enrolled paupers would die off in a few years. The funds thus released were applied to the foundation of parochial schools, two of which in four years were endowed with a fund sufficient to pay from its income an ordinary salary to the teachers.

To deal with new applications for relief an apparatus was freshly provided. An evening service was begun in the parish church, especially for the “ plebeian ” parishioners. It is said that in order the more effectually to exclude the wealthy patrons, who thronged in the morning to hear the eloquent preacher, the sermon of the day was repeated in the evening. There was a church-door collection at the second service, and the halfpence thereof provided £80 a year for the succor of the needy. Should this prove adequate, the natural sufficiency of lowly society to provide for its own would be demonstrated. This fund was disbursed by voluntary officers of experience and discretion, who were called deacons. Each deacon had charge of a district, known as a “ proportion,” of which the population numbered from 350 to 400. He was usually a man of education and social position. If practicable, he resided in or near his proportion, in order to profit by daily observation of his neighbors ; and he understood his function to be that of counseling and befriending in every way those who applied to him for aid.

In the beginning some of the deacons were confused and burdened by the frequency of applications made to them ; but when they had become familiar with their proportion, and when it was understood that every claim would be sifted and its natural resources elicited, the pressure ceased. In a few months the office became almost a sinecure. Some of the deacons had not a single recipient of parochial aid on their lists ; and during Chalmers’s four years’ pastorate but twenty were admitted to the fund, of which two were instances of disease, five grew out of desertion by the husband or father, or out of illegitimacy, and the rest were cases of penury. During the same time forty disappeared from the elders’ lists.

After the church had assumed its Town Hospital paupers, the aggregate of old and new gradually sank, and in ten years amounted to ninety-nine, or four to each proportion ; three years later it was only three to a deacon, or one less than the standard for a visitor adopted in the famous Elberfeld system.

The time consumed by their duties was reckoned by the deacons as insignificant. Said one, “ A man in ordinary business would be put to no sensible inconvenience in attending to the pauperism of any of our districts ; ” another computed that a quarter of an hour a week was required of him ; another’s estimate was twenty hours in a year ; and still another reported that his investigations consumed about an hour in five months, but that the collateral work raised this expenditure of time to an hour and a quarter each month.

The spirit in which these duties were performed may be gathered from the testimony of one of the deacons in regard to such an officer : —

“ He may so manage as at length to have naught whatever to do with the distribution of public alms, but he may stimulate the cause of education; he may give direction to habits of economy ; he may do a thousand nameless offices of kindness ; he may evince good-will in a variety of ways ; he may, even without any expenditure of money, diffuse a moral atmosphere that will soften and humanize even the most hard-favored of his people ; and as the fruit of those light and simple attentions he will at length feel that he has chalked out for himself a village in the heart of the city wilderness, whose inhabitants compose a very grateful and manageable family.” Under such an administration it is not surprising that only four fifths of the revenue from the evening collection was required to meet the new pauperism of ten thousand artisans and operatives, and that Dr. Chalmers had to exercise his ingenuity to find harmless enterprises to absorb his surplus poor-funds.

This experiment was tried in the poorest, and with one exception the most populous, parish in Glasgow. Its inhabitants were mostly workmen and small shopkeepers, a dozen households comprising its affluence. Every fifth person was Irish, and generally a Roman Catholic ; only one in fifty-eight was either an errand boy or domestic servant ; and eight hundred families were wont to abstain from attendance upon public worship.

Explanations were freely offered to account for the extraordinary result. It was urged, on the one hand, that measures so repressive as those of St. John’s would diminish the parochial pauperism by driving the necessitous to more amiable districts. But it was shown, on the other hand, that in ten years fifty-four paupers had entered the parish as against thirty-six who had left it. Men said, again, that the destitute, under so inquisitorial a plan, would not make known their distress. To this objection Chalmers returned three answers : first, that much of the apparent misery of the poor was assumed because of the existence of a fund which morally belonged to the indigent, and which clamor could obtain ; then, that self-respecting poverty was proud of its independence, and entertained the greatest aversion to the exposure of its trials; and lastly, that the suppression of public relief was more than compensated by the natural offices of neighborly kindness which immediately came into play where misfortune had no artificial aid.

In illustration of fancied or pretended misery excited by schemes of public benevolence, we may narrate Chalmers’s intercourse with the agents of an emigration society. Trade was much depressed, and the popular mind conceived that the deportation of surplus labor would relieve the stagnation of the market. Measures were set on foot to transport the unemployed to the wilds of Canada. When Chalmers was invited to take part in the scheme, he declined, on the ground that he had from principle kept aloof from all general and concerted measures for managing the poor, but he said that he would provide means for the voyage of such parishioners of his as designed to exile themselves.

Nine candidates for expatriation were reported to him; but when these saw that effective arrangements were made to send them across seas, every one of them refused to sail.

Of nothing was Dr. Chalmers more confident than the liveliness and sufficiency of personal sympathy to arrest the descent into pauperism, when it was not overborne by professional or compulsory relief. He had read in a work of Buxton’s an account of the Bristol prison, in which a meagre ration was allowed to convicts, but none to debtors, who must therefore depend on the bounty of relatives or friends for aliment. In that institution outside relief had failed again and again, but no instance was known where a debtor was allowed to endure the pangs of hunger. The criminal inmates were always ready to divide their scant supply with the deserted debtor. “ Now carry this back from prisons to parishes,” argues the doctor; “ carry it back to a population who have not undergone the depraving process that conducts to a prison, and a fortiori we may be perfectly confident that there will be no such thing as starvation permitted in any neighborhood, provided that the circumstances ot the suffering individual are known.”

The general distress of 1816 was severe in the Spitalfield, districts of London, and the government hastened to alleviate it. Among the public stores a quantity of children’s shoes were found, and the almoners decided to give these to the most necessitous pupils in the local schools. An examination undertaken for this purpose disclosed the fact that more than seventy orphan children had been received into and supported by the families of poor neighbors.

If their reiteration could make a man’s opinions clear, then we must allow Dr. Chalmers’ belief that his system, so far from being repressive, substituted more copious as well as more wholesome springs of relief than the misleading and scant ones of Kirk Sessions and of law. He justified his persuasion by his own observation at St. John’s.

A mother and daughter, living in a single room, were slowly dying of cancer. So pitiable a calamity provoked Chalmers’s utmost solicitude. He stationed a lady to observe this afflicted couple, with instructions not to allow them to suffer from want. For a year and a half, when the grave ended their misery, the observer could find no occasion to ask anywhere for assistance. Chalmers thus describes the case : “ The exuberant and untired kindness of those who were near, and whose willing contributions of food and of service and of cordials had lighted up a moral sunshine in this habitation of distress, had superseded the necessity of all other aid. Was it right that any legal charity should arrest a process so beautiful ?”

In one of the most wretched quarters of Glasgow a widow lost two grown-up children within a day or two of each other. “ I remember distinctly,” said the doctor, " seeing both the corpses on the same table; it was in my own parish. I always liked to see what amount of kindness came forth spontaneously on such occasions, and I was very much gratified to learn, a few days after, that the immediate neighbors occupying that little alley, or court, had laid together their contributions, and got her completely over her Martinmas difficulties.” Now for the sequel. Knowledge of the widow’s trouble came to The Female Society of Glasgow, and it sent a visitor, who gave all that the rules of the organization permitted, which was a crown. The people, observing this movement, concluded that the woman was in competent hands, and abandoned her without further misgiving or concern.

When an outcry was raised against Chalmers’s management in the case of a poor weaver, whose family had been attacked by typhus fever, he caused an investigation to be made, and found that the supplies rendered by the neighbors, which he had been afraid to intercept by parochial relief, exceeded in amount ten times all that would have been allowed out of the assessment fund of the city.

The doctor believed that there were innumerable fountains of affection and good-will, ready to burst into action as soon as they were released from the ice of professional or legal charity. Compared with their bounty, the most extortionate taxes and the most opulent societies were niggardly. But both sources of supply did not flow together ; the mechanical stifled the spontaneous movement, and hence the overthrow of the former liberated ampler aid for the unfortunate.

If such were Chalmers’s view, then it it is evident that he did not object to the most liberal charity, but to the method of its application. its personal administration by the hands of kindred and neighbors was the safer and better way. In such a case there was no preëxisting fund to stimulate unjustifiable expectations of abundance in the minds of the poor; there was no splendid aggregation of funds to arouse their cupidity, or to tempt them to indolence. When the poor man could depend only upon the good-will of his friends for help in trouble, although it would not fail him, he could not feel that it released him from the necessity for thrift and prudence. Nor could the recipient of aid bicker with its donors or almoners. The giver did not arm himself with suspicion, nor the taker with clamor and craft. Alms from private hands were received with delicacy and gratitude such as no legal guardians of the poor could excite. They were bestowed upon a knowledge of the beneficiary’s character and circumstances such as no professional person could obtain, and when concealment and disguise were not thought of nor practiced. They were in every way wholesome, abundant, and honorable, and to them Chalmers looked to render St. John’s parish a demonstration that pauperism was the outcome of bad artifices, and that the lowliest and poorest society left to the promptings of natural instinct would be untainted by this sore evil.

As Chalmers went to St. John’s for the sake of a social experiment, for the same reason in four years he left it. The success of his plan was credited to his popularity, or his rare gift of administration.

To show that the scheme was normal and independent of all personal elements, he resigned, and moved to Edinburgh. The parish endured two long vacancies in rapid succession, but the social experiment went on, unaffected by these trials, for fourteen years. Its termination in 1837 does not reflect upon its worth, although it does upon its timeliness.

Its greatest success was met by apathy in the public mind, where the feeling was not hostile. Its promoters could not secure imitators in other parishes, and when social reforms cease to be aggressive they decay. Moreover, the assessment was still imposed upon the inhabitants of St. John’s parish, and wrought the impression that they could by no fidelity or achievement extricate themselves from the general system of legal relief or from responsibility for it. Then, further, the disruption of the Kirk, which ended ten years of conflict in 1843, was impending, and threatened that territorial division of sessional authority upon which Dr. Chalmers’s scheme had depended for an unmolested field of operations. The tide of English invasion rose higher and higher, until, in 1845, the English method of pooradministration became the law of Scotland.

But the Chalmers plan fell as premature. Another generation has added its chapter of failure to the sad record of pauperism. Chartism came and passed away, convincing men that acts of Parliament were not a panacea for social wrongs. Men now survey the field with more experienced eyes, through a purer atmosphere and from better vantage-ground.

The essential features of Dr. Chalmers’s plan are matched in the renowned system of Elberfeld and Barmen ; they appear in the poor-administrations of Leipsic and Berlin. And when the lamented Edward Denison, with Sir Charles Trevelyan and other promoters of charity organization, called the humane spirits of England to wiser and more hopeful methods of encountering the destitute and depressed, they were not compelled to ask for patient faith in new experiments, but they pointed to Chalmers’s ministry in St. John’s Church, Glasgow, for a demonstration that society can deal effectually and beneficently with the souls and bodies of those whom misfortune and neglect have overcome.

As such a demonstration this history is vital still, and it will remain vital until his beautiful conception of lowly life dignified by independence and thrift, and sweetened by the free play of natural affection, shall be realized in many a district now the home of deceit, depravity, and disorder.

D. O. Kellogg.