Parliament, but if he had been an engineer or other workman, 
once out of a job now, the chances were, he would find the 
greatest difficulty in getting back again. Under those circum 
stances he would be swept the same as any other man toward 
industrial shipwreck. The great problem that Parliament had 
to face with regard to these industrial wrecks was the pro 
blem of floating them afresh. How were they going to do it? 
Then there was the question of personal failure. It was 
necessary to admit that the personal flaw of the individual 
contributed substantially to present-day poverty. If there 
were no personal flaw you would still have all the social 
reasons for poverty, but these reasons were augmented by per 
sonal flaws. 
He wanted them also to bear in mind that when they were 
treating with the victim of poverty they must not go upon 
the assumption that they ought to punish him, or that they 
were to handle him in such a way as to deter him from being 
a victim later on, whether his poverty arose from personal or 
social reasons. The punishing and deterring view of Poor 
Law administration was fundamentally and radically bad. 
They knew from the experience of members of Boards of 
Guardians that a very appreciable percentage of the men and 
women who appeared before Boards of Guardians mostly 
alternated between the prison and the workhouse. The 
degrading machinery of Poor Law administration was worked 
with the idea of keeping people away as long as possible, and 
the result was that the very machinery that was created on 
the assumption that degradation keeps people away actually 
does degrade them when they can keep away no longer. There 
must be social protection, of course, but the old form of social 
protection was very irrational and exceedingly immoral. 
WOMEN AND MOTHERHOOD. 
Take the special case of women. Woman was the greats’- 
problem of society. The Socialist movement and the Labour 
movement had to make quite clear to its own mind that the 
social unit that had got to be protected was not the individual 
but the family. The family must be the social unit, and the 
economics of the family should be made the basis of economic 
reconstruction. The Stgte should protect the child if neces 
sary, the State should punish the parent if necessary, the 
State should vindicate the right of the parent to a sufficient 
wage and to sufficiently good housing conditions; but when 
the State had done its duty to the parent, or while it was 
doing its duty to the parent, it should see that the parent 
paid it back in the coin of responsibility. He was not in- 
favour of what was quite erroneously called “the endowment 
of motherhood.” 
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