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Surplus Population, what?

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porting labourers from the country by artificial means, — on the supposition, that the better and more effectively any number of labourers may work, the more fully would their absence relieve the labour market;'-as if it were production instead of consumption which renders a population burdensome. On the contrary, we conceive it to be an axiom, that a well employed productive population cannot be too numerous. It proceeds as a corollary from this; that it is not from the absolute number of people to the square mile that a population is redundant; but because, from want of capital, or of energy, or of right calculation, or from some social evil or other, a part at least of the population is not working effectively and productively. With free trade-with all the world for its cornfield and its market-a tract of country may be as densely peopled as any crowded city, and yet not be subject to the curse of a redundant population in the true economic sense of the expression. There must be a naturally bad, or a demoralised and degenerate race of people, or there must be bad laws, lack of employment, or some social disease at work wherever we find this sad phenomenon of redundancy; and, with all the calamities which late years have brought upon us, it must be at this moment an object of the purest pride and most hearty satisfaction to every public-minded inhabitant of our island, to believe that the removal of bad legislation is already, by the free space which it has opened to our insular energy and enterprise, doing more to adjust our population to its means than any artificial drain can ever accomplish.

It is not from their absolute numbers, but from the kind of population which goes to make up those numbers, that Ireland is over-peopled by its eight millions; and that the West Highlands of Scotland are over-peopled with their three hundred and fifty thousand. No one who passes through the ruined streets of Cashel, and sees the ghastly prowling objects still left to supplicate subsistence from the passing traveller- no one who passes the turf huts of Kerry melting into their original bogs, while the remaining inhabitants gaze in blank and hopeless despair on their black and rotted potato stalks-can doubt for a moment that those who have fled from these ruins must be better anywhere than there. A flight of this kind is more forlorn and terrible than that of a retreating army. But as they were a thoroughly diseased population—a mortified spot in the empire, on the whole, it is as well for the country as for themselves, that they are gone; and we may fain hope that it is within the capacity of precautionary legislation and social restraints to prevent their places being re-occupied by others

of the like kind, spreading around them similar suffering, degra dation, and alarm.

Such is the effect of emigration, as a mere riddance. It is an amputation of the mortified parts of the old social system. But amputation is at all times a harsh sad business. There is, as we have already intimated, another—a nobler-a more cheering aim of emigration - the placing of those who can live, but who live poorly at home, in a position where their qualifications will have a freer range and can be exerted to a fuller purpose. The peculiar drift of our remarks will now perhaps be seen: we desire to unite, if possible, the two purposes,-to try how far a completely damaged and worthless population may be brought up to the rank of the better order of emigrants; so that they shall not be merely shovelled out of their own land, where they were a nuisance, but may be planted where they will grow lustily and bear honest sterling fruit. If we cannot do this at all for the aged, and can do it but imperfectly for the adult, there is a fine field for us in the young-the homeless, hopeless children of vice and misery, who swarm in our streets, and infest our highways. Not only in the administration of the poor laws, but in the management of the ragged or industrial schools, which the earnestness of Lord Ashley and other men of benevolent enthusiasm has lately called into existence in England, may we look for help in the accomplishment of this object. Just now it is not of so much moment to extract money from the public for charitable purposes, as rightly and effectively to direct the vast stream which is flowing in that direction. When our attention was first attracted to these schools, upwards of three years ago, by the eloquent pamphlet of Dr. Guthrie, we could not but express our most sanguine hopes from them, as an evident engine of good. They are now a fixed feature in our social system, and will remain so, unless there should be some lurking unsuspected fallacy about them, of which we are unaware. In the meantime they are at work so fully, practically, and experimentally before the public eye, that we are enabled to go beyond the first question of their general expediency, and study their special uses.

It became soon clear to their most enthusiastic supporters, that as mere places of temporary refuge, these institutions would do little permanent good-that merely to keep from mischief so many young thieves and mendicants for so many hours a day, or so many months, or even so many years, was but baling out the water not closing the leak. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that man is a creature of impulse, and energy, and enterprise; and that in this country we are living in a very hotbed of activity

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and restlessness. Our future lies not in our overlooking these powerful tendencies, or lulling them into a diseased sleep, but in directing them to good. A youth who has merely been kept from mischief, and has learned nothing by which he can earn his bread, is utterly helpless when cast back on such a world, and will be immediately dragged under its current into its lowest depths: and this must happen in such a case, even though he may have been lately surrounded for the time with the safeguards which, to those who have once a firm footing on firm ground, are an armour of proof against all temptations, we mean, of course, religious instruction and moral training. The supporters of a system, which aims at entirely sweeping our streets of destitute and vicious children, will naturally seek to economise its resources, so as to bring as many as possible within its fold. This we fear is the prevailing and characteristic weakness of the system. No arrangement can entirely cleanse our streets of imposture and pauperism. While there is so much easy and foolish benevolence to be practised on, the trade of making money through this channel will continue to exist. Of whatever numbers you clear the market, whether by fear or favour, you make it the more profitable to those who remain, and leave an inducement to new comers. With the natural fountains of supply which regurgitate from every corner of our great citieswith Ireland as a great pauper preserve always at handthe complete exhaustion of the element by any single means is hopeless. The cup of charity is like the horn which the giants in Utgard handed to Thor to test his drinking powersthe end was sunk in the sea; and the thunderer could make no impression on it save by bringing down the level of the ocean. Instead of attenuating their funds over large masses, we believe that these institutions will act in the safest and most effective manner towards society, in converting, if they can, a certain number of the degraded offspring of hereditary pauperism into men and women capable of self-support, by enabling them to produce more than they consume. This will not be accomplished by merely keeping them off the streets by allowing them food, shelter, and religious instruction, nor even by occupying their hands, unless the occupation be one which may afterwards procure them the means of subsistence. The very easiest and simplest employments which keep the hands in motion were naturally resorted to by the founders of these institutions; and we do not blame them on this ground, for in such projects we can only grope our way to the most prudent and most efficient measures through a cautious examination of results. But it was soon perceived that the picking of old ropes, the sorting of

hair for wigs, the platting of straw, and the knitting of stockings, were not the species of training that would enable those whose parents had lost for them a position in the energetic community of Britain, to win it back again by their own capacity and strength. The longer that a boy is kept to such idle occupations as these, the.less capable will he become of acquiring any better. Every system of charity is in itself a harm to the commonwealth, only justified by its efficacy in averting some other and still greater evil. But when it is once settled that a human being is to be the object of charity, it is often bad policy to stint the amount spent on him. At all events, no reasonable sacrifice should be grudged, which may hold out the prospect of lifting up the pauper and his offspring, from the unproductive to the productive level. Hereditary pauperism is a permanent addition to whatever losses the passing calamities and convulsions of society keep throwing into the chasm. And it was by this curse of hereditary irreclaimability, by workhouse and pay-table pedigrees as complete as those of the peerage, that before 1834 the pauperism of England seemed to be gradually sucking the resources of the State, rich and poor, within its vortex. Under the old system, and we fear there is too much of it still under the new, there were many instructive instances of the false economy of relieving without reclaiming. The parish apprentice was a worthless, useless, hopeless creature; he had been preserved alive, not trained; and he was often sent out of the workhouse with a frame approaching manhood but with no larger inward capacities for its guidance than those which had propelled his infant motions. The great question was, how he was to be got rid of-how to be taken off the parish. Those who wanted real workers, would rather pay a fine than have him. Through funds collected or advanced from the rates, he became endowed with an apprentice fee. The artisan who had no occasion for a serviceable apprentice, but who wanted the fee, now came forward. All kinds of tradesmen whose occupations were on the borders of pauperism, competed for these useless recruits; but their principal market was in the great starving body of the hand-loom weavers. And those who indolently favoured this wretched system might have been often enough startled into a sense of its absurdity, by the perpetually recurring phenomenon of both master and apprentice applying for parochial relief, as soon as the fee was spent. In the training school at Norwood a different example was set. Would that it had been well followed! The boy was trained to be much too valuable to require that he should be offered with a bounty. The master of the Limehouse School of Industry, where the training system had been pursued, in answer to inquiries

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by Dr. Kay Shuttleworth, replied,In the first place we diminish the period of residence in the workhouse two years: next, the apprentice fee and expenses are saved; next the children obtain superior situations; they seldom return even temporarily to a state of dependence. We have a strong con'viction that they will certainly retain an independent spirit and position in after-life, so that instead of rearing a race of paupers we are now rearing a race of independent workmen and servants. ... Frequently persons come to apply for children at the Limehouse Training School. I immediately 'tell them we give no premium. That readily disposes of scores of applications, and those who persist in the application are respectable individuals who have real need of the services of a 'well-trained and well-educated child. It was only the other day,' he continued, descending to particular instances, that the captain of a ship came to the school to ask for a boy. I 'told him that we had no boy old enough to go to sea. He 'said, "I have seen a little boy at sea scarcely higher than a ""coil of rope, who had been trained in this school, and he con""ducts himself so well, and is so active and useful, that I am "determined to have a boy like him, if I can obtain one;" and 'he told me there was a boy about his age in the house who I would suit him.’*

When it was first seen how ineffectual Ragged Schools, as they were termed, were without a skilful system of industrial training, to elevate their inmates from pauperism to self-support, the next resource naturally looked to for a solution of the difficulty was the system of human drainage or emigration. We have often dwelt upon it ourselves—and no later than January last, in a paper on Colonization-as a necessary condition to our relief, especially in the case of Ireland. But, emigration, as hitherto conducted, has been found to be no immediate solution. We must probe deeper into the evil for its cure. The constitution of society must be so repaired, as not to want a constantly recurring system of depletion. If it be left with those who have grown to manhood, and can read tracts on emigration, to judge for themselves whether they shall cross the sea, and how and where they are to take up their future abodes, surely it depends on some others to consider how our pauper youth may be best adapted to such a destination. Not that we think it would be wholesome that the youth of any class of society should be brought up

* Report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, from the Poor Law Commissioners, on the Training of Pauper Children, p. 171.