Charitable Aid Reform.

A few words in conclusion as to my own substitutes for the proposals of the Government. The questions of old age pensions and charitable aid, which are hopelessly confounded in the Bill, ought, in my opinion, to be separately treated. We want a thorough revision and simplification of our system of charitable aid which will establish direct and complete local control over the administration, and any pension scheme which is based upon poverty as well as old age should be grafted on to that system. Exacting tests of merit should be applied, but no attempt made to prescribe every qualification or disqualification by the rigid machinery of a statute. Human ingenuity is not equal to the task of making satisfactory provision in this way for all the details of every possible case. But some of the more important conditions might properly be statutory, and among them the most essential of all—that approved by Mr Booth and the English Royal Commission of 1893-95, and enacted in Denmark—viz, that the previous receipt of charitable aid, except in case of sickness or misfortune, should disqualify. I believe that this condition would be of more value as a guarantee of merit and an antidote to pauperism than all the provisos of the present Bill put together. Under no circumstances should an absolute right to a pension of this kind be recognised, and a wide discretion as to giving or withholding it, and as to the amount, should be left to the charitable authority. With an efficient and responsible administration the power might properly be given to grant something better than the miserable pittance of £18 a year, and thus to emphasise the distinction between the pensioners, whose poverty was without discredit, and the ordinary recipients of outdoor relief.