phantasmagorical

The workhouses were conducted on the assumption, widespread among the middle class, that poverty was the result of laziness alone, not of misfortune caused by hard times or other circumstances beyond the individual’s control. The alternative to earning an honest living on one’s own therefore had to be made so unattractive that the poor would be forced to find work outside rather than submit to the semi-starvation and indignities of the workhouse. Far from encouraging idleness, as the Speenhamland system [of supplementing incomes with public funds] was thought to have done, the new system made sure that the price of poverty to be paid in the unions [i.e., workhouses] was a scale of living lower than that enjoyed by the poorest-paid laborer outside. To achieve this without killing the inmates took considerable skill on the part of the overseers and staff. As several scandals revealed, they were not always successful in this delicate undertaking. Furthermore - and here the philosophy was pure Malthusianism - the workhouse required separation of the sexes. A condition of the meager succor it afforded was the breakup of the family. To those who still managed to retain a shred of self-respect, admission to the workhouse was the final blow. The Speenhamland system had been demeaning enough, because by using tax money to absolve the landowner from paying a living wage, it had required even the most willing worker to become a charity case to make ends meet. Now, entering the workhouse branded one a failure, because supposedly only the “idle,” a damning word in the Victorian social vocabulary, sought that last refuge; the industrious poor somehow managed to cope - or were expected to.

To proponents of the new system, Christ’s “The poor always have ye with you,” rightly interpreted, added religious sanction to the fatalism inherent in all political economy, not merely Malthusianism. Those who were poor would always be poor; in the nature of the case, there was no hope of better times to come. As for St. Paul’s celebration of charity as the crowing Christian virtue, when Parson Malthus confronted the apostle, Malthus won hands down. The poor might always be with us, but their prolonged survival, as encumbrances to an earth with a perpetually limited yield of food, did not have to be encouraged by charity, nor their numbers increased on the assumption that charity, in behalf of the heaven that was warranted to provide, would always be around to reward their animal-like fertility. A hard doctrine, but there it was.