Pope's command. Nothing but a power such as he wielded (however liable to abuse) would have saved Europe from the fate which has overtaken Asia Minor. Innocent was defending civilisation, though his Argonauts trampled on the luxury of the Greeks. Again, to quote Lord Acton once more, the Teutons who formed the States from which our own have sprung, 'ceased to be barbarians only in becoming Christians.' This implied a second arduous call on the Pontiff, who was perpetually engaged in softening the wild habits and military insolence of tribes that understood only how to fight. To this day the German glories in his harness of battle, his mailed fist,' and his power to use it. For hundreds of years he was little else than a Berserk, a man of blood and iron. To inspire, to transform his action, to tame and civilise him, religion devised the Truce of God, sent him to the Holy Land, terrified him with interdicts, excommunications, and the everlasting doom. He believed, even while he broke the law. We are living in quite a different order of things. Men keep the law better than they did seven centuries ago; but in large measure they do not believe. Hence their extreme difficulty in taking the proportions of any great figure which rises upon them out of the ages of faith. They grasp the ethics of revolution; they are slow to comprehend that a saviour of society has any right to inflict suffering on its assailants.

Innocent rescued Italy from the German bandits, overcame the factions of the Fatherland, brought Philip Augustus to open penitence, smote King John to his knees in the Temple Church by interdict, gave to Castile the predominance in Spain by conferring on Toledo metropolitan rank, taught Frederick II better principles than that ill-fated genius ever practised, and consecrated a new spiritual militia, the Friars of St Francis and St Dominic, who stayed the Reformation for three hundred years. Would Manichæans or Moors, both smitten down at his word, have set up a civilisation superior to the Catholic and medieval, which he saved from them? If not, he was a benefactor to mankind. This, after all, is the question that history proposes, and according as we answer it our judgment of Innocent III will take its lasting colour. WILLIAM BARRY.

Art 11.—THE REFORM OF THE POOR-LAW.

1. Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor-Laws and Relief of Distress, 1909. [Cd. 4499.]

2. The Poor-Law Report of 1909: a Summary, etc. By Helen Bosanquet. London: Macmillan, 1909.

3. The Break-up of the Poor-Law, and The Public Organi sation of the Labour Market. Minority Report of the Poor-Law Commission. Edited, with introduction, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Two vols. London: Long. mans, 1909.

4. Unemployment, a Problem of Industry. By W. H. Beveridge. London: Longmans, 1909.

THE Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor-Laws has now been in the hands of the public for some weeks. As our readers are probably by this time aware, there is a Majority Report of some 670 folio pages. This is followed by several qualifying memoranda from members of the Commission who sign the Majority Report. Of these the most important is that of Dr A. H. Downes,' Senior Medical Inspector for Poor-Law purposes to the Local Government Board for England. This document, unless we are mistaken, is destined to play a very impor tant part in guiding public opinion on the subject.

The interest of this bulky volume is still further increased by the inclusion of a separate or Minority Report, of over 500 pages, signed by the Rev. H. Russell Wakefield, Mr George Lansbury, Mr Chandler, and Mrs Sidney Webb. Mrs Webb, who, it is understood, is mainly responsible for this Report, is a convinced member of the Socialist party, and, happily for the enlightenment of the public, has a more logical view than the empirical party politician of the goal to which her arguments necessarily lead. Liberalism, if logic and etymology have any meaning, is the antithesis to socialism. A joining of issues, therefore, such as we perceive in this series of Reports, tending to bring out the irreconcilable divergence of these two opinions, is to be welcomed in the interest of intelligible controversy.

This article is a criticism, not a summary, of the

* Issued as a pamphlet by Messrs King and Son.

Reports. We content ourselves, therefore, with noticing very briefly the salient features of the two Reports, and the principal points on which they disagree. A condensed list of the 'principal' recommendations runs to forty-four pages in the original folio. We only attempt therefore to give the leading characteristics.

Both Reports criticise severely the present system. The Majority Report condemns especially the tendency which has arisen of late years to entrust the duty of giving public relief to bodies other than the Poor-Law authority, as, for instance, the relief of children by the education authority, and the relief of the unemployed by the borough councils and the authorities set up by the Unemployed Workmen Act, 1905. It accepts the continuance of the Poor-Law as a necessity, and urges that its administration should be in the hands of one authority. It recommends the enlargement of the area from the union to the county, and thinks that this would facilitate a classification of different types of paupers in separate establishments. It regards direct election as an unsuitable device for obtaining the experienced administration which is required. It recommends that the new authority should be a statutory committee of the county council (with an obligation to add to its number), to be called the Public Assistance Authority. Local committees, to be called Public Assistance Committees, are to be appointed by it for local administration. Provision is to be made for obtaining on these committees the co-operation of voluntary agencies in the work of public relief. This is one of the principal innovations suggested by the Report. It also favours an experiment in the establishment of labour exchanges, and advocates the granting to the new authority of larger powers of detention in labour colonies, together with many other minor but yet important alterations of the law.

The Minority Report, on the other hand, desires to break up the Poor-Law and to extend the policy of letting other public departments administer relief in the way specially condemned by the majority. The existing authority is to disappear. The Education Authority will take over its duties as regards children; the public Health Authority will deal with medical relief; a special authority will provide for the aged; and a Ministry of

Labour is to be appointed, which, inter alia, will deal with the able-bodied applicant for relief. Generally, it may be said, the Minority Report proclaims the responsibility of the public authority for all the vicissitudes of life. The recovery, from the applicant, of the cost of this facile system of relief, which is practically pressed on the acceptance of the poor, is so slightly and so inadequately handled that it is impossible not to feel that the authors of the Report attach little or no importance to this aspect of the question. They also propose labour-exchanges, through which, for certain scheduled trades, it should be compulsory on employer and employed to arrange their contract for hiring. Those for whom the labour-exchanges are unable to find employment are to have honourable maintenance under training'; and, though the artificial making of employment for the unemployed is condemned, the Minority propose that a sum of forty millions shall be spent within the next ten years in stimulating the demand for labour at the 'lean' seasons of trade.

The wholesale condemnation of the present administration, which is to be found in both Reports, will cause considerable heart-burning; and, if it were worth while, it would be easy to show that insufficient credit has been given for much good work which, in spite of a very defective system, has been done in many parts of the country. There is in the mind of the public some confusion of ideas. The Poor-Law, as conceived by the authors of the Report of 1834, and the administration of the law, are two totally different things. It is of course difficult, if not impossible, to embody a principle in an Act of Parliament. The Legislature in 1834, adopting the recommendations of the Commissioners, hoped that the executives appointed by the Act would give adequate relief, and at the same time so order their procedure that poor men would not, except in the last resort, abandon their efforts to remain independent by reason of the attractions of a Poor-Law maintenance. This, in popular language, is the much quoted principle that Poor-Law relief should be, or appear to be, 'less eligible' than independence.

The mistake made in the legislation of 1834 was that no sufficient guarantee was taken that this principle

would be observed by the new executives. A great part of the Report of 1834 is taken up with a condemnation of the various authorities which up to that date had administered the law; and now, after the event, we can easily see that it was a mistake to entrust the administration of the new law to the same class of persons under only slightly altered conditions. Exactly what might have been expected has happened. The new executives, with few exceptions, had no knowledge or experience in social therapeutics; and there was no sufficient means of enforcing the policy of the central control on the local authorities. The old abuses therefore, which are very natural to the normal man, crept in again. The condemnation of our present administration, so emphatically pronounced by the Majority Report, is not, therefore, levelled against the principles of 1834, but against the insufficiency and inability of the machinery then set up to carry these principles into effect.

It is extremely important that we should keep this distinction in view. It may be remembered that in 1834 there were certain theorists, whose views were set out on a celebrated occasion by Lord Brougham, prepared to argue against all Poor-Laws. The Commissioners never took this view. Justifying their opinion by reference to experiments that had been made, they pointed out that a Poor-Law could be safeguarded to a large extent by the introduction of a proper test of destitution; and, as a practical definition of destitution, they laid it down that a man is destitute when he is ready to exchange the maintenance which he derives from his own resources for one which is offered to him by the Poor-Law authorities in one of their institutions. There was however, in theory, no special virtue in the institutional buildings. There is a passage in the Report, to which the late Sir E. Chadwick was fond of referring, in which praise is given to the Rev. Thomas Whateley for his success in depauperising his parish, not by means of an institutional building, but by carefully superintending and enforcing the parish work provided for able-bodied paupers. This close personal supervision was not a possible solution in the larger areas, which, for other reasons, the Commissioners were recommending; and they relied more on the automatic institutional test.