are now. The law of liability, in the shape proposed by the Government, was actually enacted in Germany some years ago, and after a fair trial was abandoned by general consent, because of the costly litigation and universal dissatisfaction to which it gave rise. A Bill should be proposed to the next Parliament giving every worker a right to receive compensation from his employer for all accidents which befall him in the prosecution of the duties of his employment, unless they are caused by his own misconduct. A scale of compensation for various degrees of injury and disablement, according to the rate of wages received, might be specified in a schedule, instead of being left to the fluctuating caprices of judges and juries. From such a complete right to compensation as this no contracting out is necessary, and none should be allowed. The right is conferred not only for the sake of the worker himself, but for that of society at large, which would otherwise be unequally and unjustly burdened by his maintenance. If the worker were permitted, in consideration of some immediate advantage. to renounce his contingent compensation, he would in reality be selling not his own rights, but those of society. He is not in a condition to guarantee that, in the event of accident befalling him, he will not become a burden to the public, upon whom, if the employer is released from his liability, the loss will ultimately fall. In the case of a partial scheme of indemnity, like that of the Government, there is plausible ground for contending that some power of contracting out should be allowed. Prudent workers must make some provision for the three-fourths of the accidents in respect of which their employer cannot, under the proposed law, be made liable. If they form a solvent association which secures to them compensation for all accidents, it is hard to prevent such an association from selling their partial rights against their employer for an adequate contribution to their insurance fund. Indeed, a law forbidding contracting out could, if both employers and employed wished it, be easily evaded wherever a sound and solvent society for insurance against accident was established. All that would be necessary would be that the employer should receive, in exchange for a subscription to the insurance fund, an indemnity from the society against all claims for compensation which were made upon him by any of its members. He would be then in virtually the same position as if the individual members of the society had contracted with him not to prosecute their legal rights.

The rival Conservative programme is thus complete, as against partial, indemnity. Under the former the employers, because payment comes through them, would have the strongest interest in making use of every safeguard that could be invented; and the workers, though nothing can protect them against all risk, would be relieved from the dread of financial ruin as the consequence of an accident.

THE CHILDREN OF THE STATE

The measures which have been already discussed tend to diminish the number of the poor and relieve society from the burden of their maintenance. But it will be a long time before poverty is extinct, and the character of the Poor Law and of its administration will for generations to come be an element of great influence in Social Reform. That Poor Law Relief should be made so unpleasant as to deter people from applying for and accepting it is a very sound general principle, but it requires discretion in the application. A system which has no terrors for the vagabond and the loafer, but frightens the helpless widow and punishes the veteran of industry, is not satisfactory as a deterrent; while a reduction of relief, produced, not by diminishing the numbers of the idle, but by cutting off the assistance to which the young, the helpless, and the aged are justly entitled, is not a form of economy that can be commended.

Without making any fundamental change in the Poor Law and its administration, for which public opinion is not yet ripe, great reforms could be effected by changes in the law which involve no new principles, and by the use of a little more common sense in its administration. Such reforms specially affect

1. The children.

2. The sick.

3. The aged.

The condition of Poor Law children has fundamentally changed for the better since the days of Oliver Twist; but we are still far from the universal recognition of the doctrine that it is the duty of the State to turn the children for whom it has become responsible into virtuous and self-supporting men and women, and that whatever expense may be necessary for the performance of this duty is the truest economy in the end. Among the maxims that need to be impressed on authorities, central and local, are these:

1. The interests of children should not be subordinated to the object of using them as a deterrent to keep their parents off the rates. To put a young family on the back of a tramp is seldom effective as a cure for his vagabond propensities; and a method which, in a futile effort to extinguish an old pauper, runs a pretty certain risk of manufacturing half a dozen new ones is repugnant to political economy and common sense. Let society use any other means at its disposal for afflicting able-bodied paupers; children are too precious and too important to the community to be expended for that purpose.

2. Parents who cast upon the public the duty of maintaining their children ought not to be allowed to retain unchallenged their parental authority. In London workhouses children are to be found who have been maintained for more than a year by the ratepayers,

and have never found their way into the district schools. On the morning of the periodic day when children are drafted off to the schools the parent discharges himself and family, and re-enters in the evening, when the children are gone. Every child which becomes chargeable to the public should become the ward of some public authority, empowered, under proper restrictions and conditions, to prevent the parents from injuring the child. In colonies and foreign countries in which such a system has been tried it has proved most efficacious not only in benefiting those who have become children of the State, but in inducing parents to provide for children at home and not throw them upon the public. In comparison with our plan of tying children as deterrents round the parent's neck it has proved infinitely more effective.

3. Nature and experience both declare that the proper place in which to bring up a child is a family. The best thing the State can do for a child, for which it has become responsible, is to find a family in which it can be brought up at the expense of the State; in some colonies and foreign countries State children are even boarded out on this principle with their own widowed mothers. Children reared in an ordinary family become lost in the general population; as they are watched by public authority, their food, their clothes, their lodging, their schooling, are rather above than below the average of those by whom they are surrounded; and as the foster parents are selected as the best of their class, the child of the State has a rather better chance than others of securing parental love and support. In the manufacture of good men and women the cost of the process is a very unimportant element of consideration. If boarding out were the most costly way of bringing up children, it would be good economy for society, if it were also the most efficacious, to adopt it; but trials in various countries under varying conditions have proved that of all ways of bringing up children it is by a long way the cheapest.

4. If a child cannot be placed in a real home, the next best thing is to make for it an artificial one as like a real home as can be contrived. The Sheffield guardians, after having surmounted all the difficulties and obstacles placed in their way by the Local Government Board, have established a system whereby children chargeable to the rates are dispersed about the town in small houses, rented by the guardians and widely separated from one another. In each of these a dozen children, of both sexes and various ages, under the charge of an artificial mother, are lodged, clothed, and fed, like the children of an ordinary worker's family; they attend the elementary schools, Sunday services, and children's entertainments of the neighbourhood. Local intelligence has, with scant encouragement of the central authority, devised other methods of giving to the children of the State some of the advantages possessed by those brought up in

ordinary family life. Distinctive uniform has been abolished; workhouse children have been sent to share with others the common instruction of the elementary schools; institutions have been broken up into blocks, containing smaller numbers maintained as a separate family. The nearer the approach to family life the better has been the result on the health, intellect, and morals of the children; in no case has the cost been greatly increased; in most it has been materially diminished.

5. Of all methods of bringing up children the worst is to collect them together in hundreds in great barrack schools. Their health suffers: ophthalmia is ever present, and can only be kept in check by rigid quarantine and costly apparatus for washing; ringworm and other skin disorders are rife; contagious disease, whenever it obtains an inroad, spreads with frightful rapidity. Their intellects suffer: in spite of the regularity of attendance, and the discipline out of school from which they are never free, their scholastic attainments are vastly inferior to those of the children in common elementary schools. Their characters suffer: modesty, self-respect, and selfdependence are uncultivated. They miss that best part of education which is given by the incidents of family life. They have nobody who loves and cares for them, for what guardian or superintendent, however benevolent, can love a thousand children? They are turned out into the world as helpless as the chickens from an incubator. But the buildings, the staff, the contractors, and all the vested interests gathered round such institutions exist and form a strong passive obstacle to any reform that would prevent the machine from grinding on. The interest of the ratepayers demands its destruction. If the apparatus for turning out men and women which they have bought and paid for is inefficient and produces disastrous results, it is better to throw it away than to go on using it.

THE SICK

It is obviously the direct interest of society that workers who are disabled by temporary sickness should be cured as quickly as possible and restored to the ranks of self-supporting citizens. Society has got the burden of the sick already upon its shoulders. They have to be somehow cared for and maintained by those who are whole. But the demand upon society is much increased, the comfort of the sick diminished, and their recovery retarded by the lamentable defects in the organisation of medical relief. There is here a wide field for reform, legislative and administrative. Besides medical outrelief and workhouse infirmaries there are the hospitals for those who are able to beg letters of recommendation from the subscribers; there are free dispensaries connected with the Church and religious bodies; there are clubs and societies of every degree of respectability

and solvency-all liable to overlap. A lady resident in East London informed me that she once knew a man who was attending fourteen doctors at the same time. The man died.

Sickness is such a common incident of life that everybody should make provision against it. In Germany people are compelled to do so by law. In our country a large proportion do it spontaneously through the agency of Friendly Societies and clubs. On the other hand neither humanity nor self-interest permits society to abandon those, who while in health have in this respect neglected their duty, to languish unaided in sickness. Our State has so entirely given up the theory that it is the duty of every citizen to rely for aid in sickness upon his own providence as to declare by law that medical relief does not pauperise, and that the recipient of it is entitled to all the rights of an independent citizen. The logical outcome of such a doctrine is that society should provide free medical advice and treatment for all who think fit to apply. By a better organisation of existing institutions even this could be effected not only without throwing any additional burden upon the public, but probably with some alleviation of that which it has already assumed.

But whatever opinions may be held as to the expediency of the State carrying out in practice the free medical relief to which it has committed itself in theory, there can be no two opinions as to the duty of maintaining such public institutions for the sick as do exist in a state of complete efficiency. There are some workhouse infirmaries which compare favourably with the best hospitals; but there are many, as appears from recent reports in the British Medical Journal, in which there is no trained nurse at all; in many there is no night nurse; in most the nursing staff is composed of pauper inmates, wholly unfit for the duty. There is no service of nurses recognised by the Local Government Board. The nurse is placed at the mercy of the matron, who is generally her inferior in education and character. In many unions, both in London and the country, the buildings are antiquated or imperfectly adapted to modern requirements by patching; there are no baths, no hot and cold water supply, no sanitary arrangements, no children's wards, no classification, no screens, no surgical supplies. In many the wards in which the sick have to pass the whole of their time are shamefully overcrowded. The master and matron of these, as of other Poor Law institutions, are often wholly incompetent for the difficult duties they have to discharge. The Local Government Board inspectors having eyes see not, and having noses smell not; no special qualification or training for their duties is required of them, and they might go on visiting infirmaries till doomsday without discovering their defects. Inspection by women has not been attempted. All this inefficiency is the result of the ignorance and apathy of local authorities, seconded by the indifference and incapacity of the Local Government Board.