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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