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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 75

National Insurance

National Insurance.

Of the genuine and universal pension schemes Canon Blackley's proposal for compulsory insurance seems to me the most logical end the most manly. It compels each man to bear the burden of his own old age, and secures the provision from him at the time when he can best afford it and would be most likely to waste it. It does nothing to encourage the dangerous superstition that the State is a kind of universal store from which each man may draw-according to his needs without contributing to it, yet without exhausting it, and without injustice or loss of self-respect. It fosters the truer and manlier doctrine, which recognises the obligation of the State in these matters, but considers it to be best discharged by quickening and supplementing instead of weakening individual responsibility and self-reliance. The Royal Commission on the Aged Poor pronounced against the scheme for England on the ground that public opinion there did not favor the compulsory principle. That was proper ground for Commissioners to take who were advising a Legislature as to immediate action, but it would be a mean and cowardly fatalism on the part of any member of a young and impressionable democracy to accept such a consideration as final. If the scheme is sound and would really be even a partial cure for a very great evil, then the public opinion which condemns the scheme needs altering, and not the scheme itself. Public opinion must be educated up to the approval of the remedy which in reason and principle appears to be the best. The best will then have become the practicable, and the evil can be grappled with.