Mr. Booth would remove the “very poor,” and plant them in industrial communities under proper government supervision.

“Put practically, my idea is that these people should be allowed to live as families in industrial groups, planted wherever land and building materials were cheap; being well-housed and well-warmed, and taught, trained, and employed from morning to night on work, indoors or out, for themselves, or on Government account.”

The Government should provide material and tools, and having the people entirely on its hands, get out of them what it can.  Wages should be paid at a “fair proportionate rate,” so as to admit comparison of earnings of the different communities, and of individuals.  The commercial deficit involved in the scheme should be borne by the State.  This expansion of our poor law policy, for it is nothing more, aims less at the reformation and improvement of the class taken under its charge, than at the relief which would be afforded to the classes who suffered from their competition in the industrial struggle.  What it amounts to is the removal of the mass of unemployed.  The difficulties involved in such a scheme are, as Mr. Booth admits, very grave.

The following points especially deserve attention—­

1.  Since it is not conceivable that compulsion should be brought to bear in the selection and removal out of the ordinary industrial community of those weaker members whose continued struggle is considered undesirable, it is evident that the industrial colonies must be recruited out of volunteers.  It will thus become a large expansion of the present workhouse system.  The eternal dilemma of the poor law will be present there.  On the one hand, if, as seems likely, the degradation and disgrace attaching to the workhouse is extended to the industrial colony, it will fail to attract the more honest and deserving among the “very poor,” and to this extent will fail to relieve the struggling workers of their competition.  On the other hand, if the condition of the “industrial colonist” is recognized as preferable to that of the struggling free competitor, it must in some measure act as a premium upon industrial failure, checking the output of energy and the growth of self-reliance in the lower ranks of the working classes.  No scheme for the relief of poverty is wholly free from this difficulty; but there is danger that the State colony of Mr. Booth would, if it were successful as a mode of “drainage,” be open to it in no ordinary degree.

2.  Closely related to this first difficulty is the fact that Mr. Booth provides no real suggestion for a process of discrimination in the treatment of our social failures, which shall distinguish the failure due directly to deep-seated vice of character and habit, from the failure due to unhappy chance or the fault of others.  Difficult, almost impossible, as such discrimination between deserving and undeserving is, it is felt that any genuine reform of our present poor law system demands that some attempt in this direction should be made.  We must try to distinguish curable from incurable cases, and we must try to cure the former while we preserve society from the contamination of the latter.  The mere removal of a class of “very poor” will not suffice.