Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  The aversive reflex against the supposedly charitable aspects of the Poor Laws has been an extraordinarily important force in the development of British culture and society. Landed proprietors were obliged to pay poor rates for laborers who lived on their lands—which seems fair enough, since the workers were a burden on the taxpayer in the exact proportion that the proprietor chose to stint on wages. But where these lordly personages were concerned, fair enough was never good enough. By the simple device of pulling down the cottages on his land, or letting them rot from neglect, the proprietor made his workers find shelter elsewhere, and excused himself from the obligation to pay their rates. As one unhappy consequence, laborers were obliged to walk miles every day to the fields. As another, they became burdens on ratepayers other than the employer who then could profit more substantially by stinting their wages and by turning them away when they were not needed. He could save the expense of sustaining them in sickness or slack times and then have the benefit of a reasonably intact work force when it was wanted. Instructed by the example of landlords, neighboring villages limited the building of cottages on the theory that they were thereby limiting the numbers of potentially indigent who could settle in them. But since these populations were obliged to live as near as they could to their work, the result was simply a fantastic crowding of existing cottages, for which exaggerated demand made rents high and repair unnecessary.

  Having neither time to cook food nor fuel to cook it with, farm laborers bought what they ate from shopkeepers, like industrial workers. Their cottages leaked, but they had no way to dry their clothes, which they wore till they rotted away. Human waste is often described as being in heaps beside their cottages, and this compounded the effects, in terms of ill health, of the crowding together of malnourished and exhausted people. Robert Hughes, in his book The Fatal Shore, about the penal settlements in Australia, observes that convicts seem not to have found life on the farms there worse than in rural England. The wretchedness of life in England established the norms of life in Australia, where English wretches went to be punished.

  The importance of the ideas that idleness should be regarded as a crime and that charity corrupts by encouraging idleness cannot be overstated. Conceding everything one must about the hypocrisy and corruption of church-administered charity, the kind prevalent in Europe into this century, still the transaction is sanctified, words of consecration have been said over it, and there is nothing in writ or tradition to suggest that any soul, however disreputable, who comes to the table of charity eats and drinks to his own damnation. In England, however, just such reprobation is believed to follow any undeserved relief. The moral deterioration set on by charity predisposes the worker to the vices that produce indigency—in other words, suffering is the fault of the poor, liable to be exacerbated rather than relieved by any effort to help them. Misery itself becomes a proof that its sufferers are indulged and lacking in character—and there has always been enough misery in Britain to demonstrate, by this reasoning, prodigious generosity toward a public that is always less deserving. Beatrice Webb, my favorite British socialist, never wearies of warning against the “demoralization” and “pauperization” which may follow from any brush with public relief. There is, therefore (so great is the tendency of charity to corrupt), a presumed obligation to withhold relief even from the worthy. Much is always made, in British thought, of the need to distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, but the institutional history of the Poor Law system will make it clear that the only way to deserve help is not to need it, or at any rate not to ask for it. Those who ask to be assisted are not merely therefore suspect but also exposed to the risk of decline into the condition of unworthiness they might to that point have escaped. At the same time, those who might choose to starve with their families rather than accept relief on such terms are viewed as deserving of imprisonment on those grounds. In the whole abundant British literature the Poor Laws have generated, hardly a kind thing has been said about them—except, of course, that they are the folly of a too melting nature and that they anticipate the Welfare State. The most persistent criticism made of them is that they create poverty, the same sad result that Frederick Eden laid to religious charity before the destruction of the monasteries.

  They did create poverty, of course. In every form, their effect has been to depress wages—by imposing them legally, or by preventing workers from seeking to sell their labor at its market value; or by criminalizing idleness, not merely in men, but in women and children also, obliging them to labor simply to remain unmolested; or by subsidizing wages to bring them up to the level of subsistence, relieving employers of even the practical need to maintain their workers at the level of “physical efficiency,” while exacting labor as proof of meriting such largesse.

  Evolution has given the accolade of stability to the sharp tooth, the thick skin, the small brain. Poor Law theory plods on through volatile centuries, only more itself, losing reflection to instinct. If one was inclined to believe that ideas over time acquire greater delicacy or complexity, the history of these laws would constitute a refutation. Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth-century theorist of Social Darwinism, is no advance on Frederick Eden, or William Beveridge on William Hazlitt: reflections on the Poor Laws, among that select group whose thoughts are recorded, are always critical—saddened, indignant, or resigned. Every criticism of the system that can be made has been made at one time or another. But its assumptions are never called into question—or they were once, by Adam Smith. Smith made the novel case that the wealth of nations should be calculated in terms that included the prosperity of their working people: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed, and lodged.” He went off to his grave with praise ringing in his ears, and was not seriously attended to, then or since.

  The assumption that workers must be poor passes unmodified into the literature of political economy. The “labor theory of value,” the idea that labor produces all value, makes its appearance very early, in the work of the seventeenth-century writer William Petty, and quietly establishes itself as orthodoxy. It seems never, however, to imply—except to Smith—that the laborer, the producer of wealth, would have any share in it. On the contrary. The poor, being the producers of this valuable commodity, labor, rather as sheep are of wool, must be kept in an optimum state of productivity. That is, they must be obliged to work in order to live. If they get a little money ahead—this wisdom is often repeated—it goes to drunkenness and rioting. And in any event, the political economists discovered “wage-fund theory” and “subsistence theory,” which meant together that only a certain portion of the national wealth can be spent on wages, beyond which the whole would be reduced, and that wages tended naturally to sink or rise to the level called “subsistence.” Science (for so they took these theories to be) frequently obviated certain questions of justice, while throwing others into sharper relief. By the light of these theories, for example, it was plainly to be seen that the prosperity of one worker could come only at the cost of other workers, so equity required what fate decreed, that wages should remain low.

  Again, invariably the interests of the state, and its authority, merge with those who employ. Much is made of the polarization of classes in Britain. Its origins are not mysterious. Until 1948 the working class was governed by a restrictive legal code which did not touch its socioeconomic betters, those prosperous enough to have their idleness called leisure. At the time of the earliest statutes there was as yet no compulsory provision for the poor which would make their indigency an expense to the taxpayer. The loss of labor would affect only employers. Still, the laws make the idle worker “an enemy of the commonwealth.” Again, the enforcement of the law depends upon informers, whose reward could be the
vagrant person himself or herself in the role of slave. To keep a slave would have been at least as costly as to hire someone when wages meant only subsistence, so the law clearly assumes that any informer would be of the employing classes. The law is written to assure unobstructed access to the work of laborers by potential employers of labor. The law seems designed to settle the question of whether the laborer owns his labor as property and has the right to govern its use. He or she has no such right. The punishment for such an assertion of freedom is slavery.

  Lacking the right to withhold their labor, or to sell it in the best market, the poor were utterly vulnerable to what Karl Marx calls “exploitation.” One would be hard put to find a better word. The early laws teased loose any connection between work and payment. Subsequent laws put charity in the place of pay, insofar, at least, as wages were subsidized by a system designed to compensate for their meagerness, intermittency, and downward drift. One worked to stay out of the clutches of this charity if at all possible, and to be found deserving of it if all else failed. It was this William Blake must have had in mind when he wrote: “Charity would be no more / If we didn’t make somebody poor.”

  It seems strange, in retrospect, that the persistent problem of poverty should vex the best minds of England for so very long. In 1704, Daniel Defoe launched a distinguished tradition in a searing attack on the Poor Laws, addressed to the Parliament, called Giving Alms, no Charity. He argued against the employment of the poor in workhouses and houses of correction on the grounds that poverty derives from the “crimes of our People,” which he enumerates: (1) luxury, (2) sloth, (3) pride. The English are well paid but improvident. “There’s nothing more frequent, than for an Englishman to Work till he got his Pocket full of Money, and then go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till ’tis all gone, and perhaps himself in debt.” This is why “children are left naked and starving, to the care of the Parishes.” Defoe argues that the labor of the dependent poor will cause economic dislocations and “take the Bread out of the Mouths of diligent and industrious Families to feed Vagrants, Thieves and Beggars.” Defoe has put his finger on a problem, of course. The competition of forced labor would lower the value of wage labor. His solution is based on the assumption that people are indigent through their own fault, that the rigors of the law should force vagrants and beggars to find the work which is, he insists, available.

  We have all seen people grow warm denouncing the chiselers and the spongers, either strong or fat, who squander their food stamps on soft drinks and corn chips, while their unkempt, innumerable children wait on the curb. They have earned their corn chips many times over in savings to the public treasury, since their mere existence, whether real or rhetorical, has always counseled restraint.

  Defoe’s tract, however, is interesting because it is an early example of the erecting of economic theory on a highly peculiar conception of labor. His language makes no distinction between the independent poor and the indigent or dependent poor, since a “general Taint of Slothfulness” predisposes the entire class to improvidence and beggary. Yet, he declares, “even all the greatest articles of Trade follow, and as it were pay Homage to this seemingly Minute and Inconsiderable Thing, the poor Man’s Labour.”

  The great prosperity of England, its “vast Trade, Rich Manufactures, mighty Wealth,” rests, ironically, on this most uncertain foundation. If a man who gets a little money ahead uses it only to buy drink, to lie in the alehouse while his children starve, high wages are in no one’s interest. Workers in other countries earn less, he says, and live more comfortably. The situation, as Defoe sees it, is this: Poverty is caused not by too little money but, in the short term at least, by too much of it. The disposition of the poor toward sloth and luxury means that any excess of money might plunge them into ruin. Money has just the same destructive effect as idleness, into which it is readily converted. Defoe claims there are a thousand fathers of families “within my particular knowledge” who “will not work, who may have Work enough, but are too idle to seek after it, and hardly vouchsafe to earn anything more than bare Subsistence, and Spending Money for themselves.” A class of such extreme moral fragility, at the same time so crucial to the national well-being, needs not charity but regulation.

  Defoe’s essay is an early application of Poor Law thinking to the new circumstances of industrialization. It is an attack on the “charitable” aspect of the laws, which were devised to exact labor but which critics from Defoe to the present would accuse of impeding access to labor by corrupting the working class. The discourse is a dialectic of frying pan and fire, centered around an unquestioned assumption that the poor are in need of aggressive management for their own well-being, which altogether coincides with Britain’s commercial success. Industrialism took the form that it did because rural populations were driven off the land into a world that harrowed them for their misery. The factory system throve on the existence of a class without resource or expectation, a stigmatized class whose existence at worst and at best was penal servitude. If this class had not existed, industrialization might have occurred differently, not only in Britain, but in every country where Britain served as an example. Defoe’s essay, written at the very start of the eighteenth century, already describes England as a trading and manufacturing country, and already expresses fears of foreign competition. (The Muscovites are acquiring British technology, and there people work for “little or nothing.”)

  Appearing this early, in a setting where feudalism had changed rather than receded—to dispose of people so peremptorily is a great demonstration of power, not a renunciation of it—and where feudalism was put on guard repeatedly, and never overthrown, it is to be expected that certain features of the old order should be retained in the new industrial society. Defoe was aware that the wealth of the country was expanding rapidly, and that these changed fortunes were the result of the development of the textile industry begun by Queen Elizabeth. How is the new wealth to be distributed? Will there be a proportional rise in the prosperity of all ranks of society? Defoe’s tract is an argument for keeping the vast class of labor on a short tether, a subsistence wage. The workhouse was, after all, the least controversial element of the Poor Law system, savoring little of charity in the Scriptural sense, while it enforced the all-important role of worker upon its inmates and, if it was managed properly, turned a little profit. Nevertheless, the system does, as Defoe represents it, increase the proportion of the national wealth consumed by the poor by excusing them from the need to be provident. His wastrels spend themselves into poverty and then become dependents of the parish. Where their wages, if they were frugal, would have sufficed, they have consumed their earnings as well as whatever they and their children end up costing the taxpayer. Aside from its other inconveniences, he argued, the Poor Law system makes the poor secure.

  Henry Fielding also wrote about the Poor Laws, and submitted a plan to Parliament for their reform. He was warmly in favor of workhouses, and wished only to make them more efficient. Fielding was astonished, as a great many writers would be, that “in a country where the poor are, beyond all comparison, more liberally provided for than in any other part of the habitable globe, there should be found more beggars, more distressed and miserable objects, than are to be seen throughout all the states of Europe.” Among these “miserable objects,” however, those unable to work were so few that they should be left to private charity, and the Poor Law system designed to give work to the able-bodied. Streamlined according to his recommendations, the poorhouses would be considerably more profitable—off-loading the lame and the blind would necessarily effect a savings.

  Not surprisingly, Fielding has a theory of wages, which is linked to his grand design thus: Wages should be fixed, to discourage idleness. This reform would defeat those who, “if they cannot exact an exorbitant price for their labour, will remain idle.” It will provide magistrates with proof of the willingness to work, or its opposite, for purposes of distinguishing the idle from the incorrigibly idle. Again,
work is pried loose from pay. Work proves one deserving—more effectively when the issue of willingness to work is not obscured by the possibility of holding out for a higher wage. In Fielding’s scheme the workhouse is already integrated into the wage system, since to qualify for non-punitive accommodations there, one must have been employed.

  The economic and moral argument that wages must and will be kept low is embodied in the work of the earliest English socialist, the cotton manufacturer Robert Owen. Owen built a model factory community called New Lanark, which, through new housing, communal cooking and laundry, schooling of children, and programs of recreation, elevated the living standards of his employees. In an introduction to his New View of Society, he explicitly describes factory workers as human machines among inanimate machines “which it was my duty and interest so to combine, as that every hand, as well as every spring, lever and wheel, should effectually co-operate to produce the greatest pecuniary gain to the proprietors.” Visitors and dignitaries the world over came to admire his success.