Newspaper Cutting, unnamed newspaper but dated (London) 6 January 1935:
THE POOR LAW TRANSFORMED
AN ACT OF REDEMPTION
Tomorrow is a day on which we may find good cause to congratulate ourselves. The Unemployment Act, 1934, comes into operation, and the poison that the Poor Law Amendment Act, 1834, injected into our national life is finally expurgated. No centenary that we may celebrate in the current year is comparable with this moral advancement.
When England parted with the old order, and by the Reform Act committed her destinies to the middle-class voter, she fell under the sway of enthusiasts for system and method. It was the hey-day of the theorist. Exasperated by the errors of rule-of-thumb, he set out to create a new world on the basis of principles and statistics. Relief of the poor had been conducted on lines that were capable of abuse. He determined that the benevolence of the State should not be forthcoming until the means of self-support were utterly exhausted. Destitution might claim relief – but nothing short of it. To the appeal of want were opened the doors of the workhouse – which meant the surrender of the home.
No greater piece of self-righteous cruelty has ever been perpetrated in this land of kindliness. Drunk with the new wine of economic science, the politicians were blinded to human realities and human values. They ignored all that is meant by the family and the hearth. They were indifferent to the horrors of a promiscuous institutional existence for the respectable poor. They may have accentuated, “according to plan,†the struggle for industrial self-support and in that way increased the kinetic energy of the community. But they trampled out of thousands of their fellow creatures the last impulse of activity, and robbed life of its meaning for old and young. The new Poor Law became a name of loathing for every wage-earner. The sense of being mere factory-fodder sank deep into the consciousness of the working class. The toiler had lost his status as a human being and become only an economic unit.
Remote as that tragedy of intellectual perversion may be from our own generation, and mitigated as its original harshness has been in the interval, it has never ceased to curdle the milk of public charity. The stigma of the New Poor Law – whatever alleviations have been introduced into its application – has never disappeared, nor the bitterness with which the unfortunate were made to recognise themselves as the refuse of industry. The Act that comes into force tomorrow gives the evil spirit its final exorcism. By its recognition of family rights, its elasticity of treatment, and its fostering of crippled capacity, it is a signal vindication of common citizenship and national fraternity. It is a tardy, but true, measure of corporate atonement.