The Victorian Royal Commission, 1897-98.

The one practical suggestion in the report of the Royal Commission on Old Age Pensions presented to the Victorian Parliament a few months ago is of a similar character. The florid and pretentious style of this document is familiar enough to us in third-rate journalism, but looks somewhat odd in a Blue Book. It opens with the grandiose and nonsensical declaration that "the palliatives of political expediency must give way to the drastic panaceas of resolute statesmanship," but ends tamely enough with the suggestion of pensions (i.e., outdoor relief) for the deserving aged poor and the workhouse for the undeserving. "Undeserving," by the way, is not their word; they abandon the usual nomenclature, and among the poor, at any rate, recognise only the "deserving" and the "less deserving." Seeing that by their own definition the less deserving consist of "those who have been intemperate, extravagant, indolent, improvident, lawless, and generally those who have made no reasonable effort to provide for the future," it would seem that they have not discovered any obvious traces of higher merit in this class than have previous observers. But one result of universal suffrage appears to be a growing inability to impute positive demerit to any man who has a vote unless he happens to have some other marketable property besides. This strange compound of maudlin humanitarianism with calculating hypocrisy—this regard for our weaker but enfranchised brother, which is shared by the light-headed sentimentalist yearning to relieve his weakness, and the light-fingered demagogue yearning to capture his vote, is what threatens democracy with the gravest dangers in the sphere of social experiment.