designated without distinction as the "veterans of labour." Since the removal of the pauper disqualification a good many people who have been in receipt of parochial relief for years have become these veterans of labour, and have obtained, or are qualifying for, an old age pension. The able-bodied unemployed are now promised "honourable" maintenance. We are asked to abolish the last "stigma" of the Poor Law by doing away with the word "pauper." The electoral disqualification has been removed in the case of outdoor medical relief. Schemes of Poor Law reform are in the air, which all tend to make the receipt of relief more honourable and more acceptable.
The object of this paper is to examine the relations of these various forms of public relief to one another, and to watch their general tendency. We will take them in order under their several heads:—
The Unemployed Workmen Act, 1905.
This Act was the direct outcome of Mr Chamberlain's Circular of 1886, by which local bodies were instructed to give work, outside the Poor Law, to the better class of workman "ordinarily in work and temporarily unemployed." The Circular, intended for a special occasion, was issued again and again by his successors at the Local Government Board, and for twenty years vestries and other local bodies were occupied in trying to make work for the unemployed. It is of special importance because it made the first breach in the unity of the Poor Law. The work given was quite inadequate, often only amounting to one or two days a week, and it was found to interfere with the work of those ordinarily employed by the local authorities. Meanwhile a generation was brought up to look to the vestries for employment-relief, and crowds gathered, winter after winter, round the offices of the local authorities, demanding it. Ultimately the position became intolerable, and in 1905 the Unemployed Workmen Act was passed as an attempt to regularise this relief, and to liberate the local authorities
