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Page 34
These schemes for the establishment of State institutions offering
work to the indigent will never solve the problem of want, and all
attempts that have hitherto been made in that direction have either
ended in failure or met with small success.
The latest of these schemes is a village settlement, which the
authorities in New Zealand started some time ago to meet the case of
the unemployed. The Government, in the first place, spent �16,000 in
making roads and other conveniences for the settlers, and afterwards
advanced �21,000 for building houses, buying implements, and so on.
According to recent advices from New Zealand, only �2000 of this
advance has been paid back, and it is the general feeling of the
colony that the project has proved a failure. These, and other
experiments of a similar character, compel us to recognise the
disagreeable fact that a certain proportion of people who are in the
habit of falling out of work are, as a class, extremely difficult to
put properly on their legs. Failure, for some reason or another,
always dogs their steps, and the more Society does for them, the less
they will be disposed to do anything for themselves.
When such persons are sent to prison on charges of begging, or petty
theft, it very often happens that they are assisted on their release
by a Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society. Tools are given them, work is
found for them, yet they do not thrive. Not infrequently the job is
given up on some frivolous pretext; or if it is a temporary one,
little or no effort is made till it actually comes to an end to look
out for another. It is little wonder that men who live in such a
fashion should occasionally be destitute; the only wonder is that they
manage to pass through life at all. Those men hang upon the skirts of
labour and seek shelter under its banner, but it is only for short and
irregular intervals that they march in the ranks of the actual
workers. The real working man knows such people well, and heartily
despises them.
Would it be a right thing to increase the burdens of the taxpayer by
opening State workshops, even if such a plan were feasible, for men of
the stamp we have just been describing? Decidedly it would not. Yet
these men form a fair proportion of the persons whom we have classed
as driven to crime by economic distress. As far, then, as the criminal
population is concerned, no necessity exists for the organisation of
State factories; and so far as destitution is a factor in the
production of crime, it can be grappled with by other agencies. In
fact, if a graduated system of Unions, with a kind of casual ward,
somewhat after the German Naturalverpflegstationen, could be worked
and if Trade Societies adopted, under proper precautions, the
principle of allowing debilitated members of their trade the
opportunity of doing something at a somewhat reduced rate, it would be
impossible for any well-intentioned man to say that he was driven to
crime from sheer want. It is worth while, on the part of the nation,
to make some small sacrifice to attain an object so supremely
important as this. It is very probable that hardly any sacrifice will
be needed. In any case it would get rid of the uncomfortable feeling
entertained by many that there are occasions when human beings are
punished who ought to be fed. It would completely alienate all
sympathy from crime; it would then be known that criminal offenders
deserved the punishment they received, and justice would be able to
deal with them with a firm and even hand.
CHAPTER V.
POVERTY AND CRIME.
Having analysed the part played by destitution in the production of
crime, the cognate question of the extent to which poverty is
responsible for it will now be considered. If actual destitution does
not count for very much in producing criminals, it may be that poverty
makes up the difference, and that the great bulk of delinquency, if
not the whole of it, arises from the combined operation of these two
economic factors. We have examined one of them, let us now go on to
the other. As this examination will have to be conducted from several
different points of view which, for the sake of clearness, it will be
expedient to consider one by one, I shall begin by inquiring what
light international statistics are capable of throwing on the
relations between poverty and crime. At the outset of this inquiry we
are at once met by the old difficulty respecting the value of
international criminal statistics. The imperfection of those
statistics is a matter it is always important to bear in mind, but in
spite of this circumstance the light which they shed on the problem of
poverty and crime is not to be rejected as worthless.
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