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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 75

Merit and Success

Merit and Success

Merely to say that the Bill is a Charitable Aid Bill, and not an Old Age Pensions Bill, would not necessarily be to condemn it. As a Charitable Aid Bill it might still have its uses and its justification. Note that by leaving that important word "deserving" standing in my second preamble I have admitted that there are cases of indigence in old age which cannot be attributed to the demerits of the sufferer. Someone has said that success is a rough test of merit, but that it is the only test we have. Worldly success is too often a very delusive test indeed. The formula of the survival of the fittest is a truism which is made to cover a deal of falsehood. It merely means that those survive who are fittest to survive; it is falsely supposed to imply that they are necessarily fittest for any other purpose. Those who succeed in the worldly struggle do so sometimes because they are fitter for gaol, and often because they are less fit for Heaven, than those whom they surpass. Mr Booth mentions the case of a young girl of his acquaintance who was earning 10s a month in service, and out of that for some time sent 8s a month to her poor and aged mother. The prospects of worldly success for that young creature were not brilliant. In after life she would probably be stripping herself in the same way for her children, and, it may be, a drunken husband, and thereby, according to the cant of the survival of the fittest, ultimately establishing her fitness for the workhouse.