THOMAS CHALMERS
In 1913 Professor Tawney made clear that to him ‘the problem of poverty was not a problem of individual character and its waywardness, but a problem of economic and industrial organization’. If this were the view of 1913, it was not generally held at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The common belief then was that many of the poor were afflicted because of their own perversity. Even widows and orphans, the handicapped or sufferers from bad health who were in poverty were not in every case regarded as deserving; for were there not many in like pass who did not become parasites on the community, but whose guardians had foreseen and provided against such an emergency; or who through their own strength of character and resourcefulness had overcome the dangers of poverty and dependence? Denied the resources of modern psychological and genetical research, those with a social conscience who wished to ameliorate the lot of the under-privileged were obliged to accept facts as they saw them, and the motives and methods of social work they performed were similarly unillumined. To them the greatest social problem was the fact of poverty, and the researches of Eden in his State of the Poor, 1795, had not only described the conditions in which the poor found themselves in the early years of what proved to be a long and expensive war, but had also investigated the various hypotheses then current about the causes of poverty. This, though in no sense a scientific document in the modern meaning of the phrase, did indicate how widespread were poverty and misery.
Some years later in 1806, Colquhoun, the Metropolitan Magistrate, produced his treatise on Indigence, quoting widely from previous authors on the subject, like Eden, Daniel Defoe, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Malthus, Sir Thomas Bernard and others. Colquhoun's exposition on the causes of poverty was as clear as any available at that time, and had a wide circulation. But as with the writings of Malthus certain sections only were generally accepted, and the rest ignored by all but the few. Thus Colquhoun pleaded for greater productivity so that the national income could be increased. He advocated a centralized system of education and an extended use of apprenticeship so that the working classes could achieve the dual purpose of solving their own individual difficulties and increasing the national prosperity. Yet those who felt concern for the condition of their fellow citizens in want or distress tended to be less influenced by these larger considerations, and more by his division of the poor into the deserving and the undeserving.
It was not ’poverty’, he had said, that was the evil. For a man was in poverty when he had no property, no surplus upon which to live, but must depend upon his own labour for subsistence. Poverty so defined, he declared, was an indispensable ingredient in society, as unless man was obliged to labour, no work would be done, and our civilization would fall. It was the state of ‘indigence’ that was the real danger. For indigence could be defined as the state of anyone destitute of the means of subsistence who either could not or would not work to procure it. It was obvious that between poverty and indigence there were many gradations. Circumstances might arise in which a person was permanently or temporarily forced out of employment, whether through handicap or bad trade. This he called ‘innocent indigence’. When a danger like this threatened, he argued, it was necessary to ‘prop up poverty’. In other words he wanted social relief or social work among the ‘deserving’. But in others, indigence was ‘culpable’, through waste, drunkenness, or immorality; in these cases relief should be absent and punitive methods used instead. He admitted that ‘innocent indigence was often confounded with the culpable’, a confusion that was bound to occur so long as members of one class drew moral distinctions about how members of another class should behave, but on the general principle of the division between the culpable and the innocent he was quite clear. The way was therefore open for the humane and sensitive to give what help they could to those in poverty and trouble from causes outside their own control. It is in the work they did that the origins of family case work are to be found. Theirs was the simple response to a given situation, theirs the friendly acts of good neighbourliness, which when organized and developed, have become the skilled and sophisticated relationship of social worker and client that is implied by the modem connotation of case work.
It is not easy to find a common pattern in the work of the innumerable societies, temporary or permanent, that were in existence when the century opened or were formed in the early part of it; nor much that could be thought of as a coherent policy or an established method of work. Most societies were ad hoc, with little idea of what others were doing, and if co-operation were fostered, it was on a local basis, seldom on a national. The one centre of thought and influence that did stand out in the seven decades before the foundation of the C.O.S. was that of Thomas Chalmers, whose ideas on poverty and visiting had an effect far beyond the confines of Glasgow. If there were any unity in family case work then, it was due to him, and to his basic philosophy about social work and the rights and duties of the poor.
More than a century after his death it is difficult to tell whether Chalmers will be remembered most for his influence on social work, or the part he played in the disruption of the Scottish Church. Born in East Anstruther, Fife, in 1780, the sixth child of a prosperous merchant, he was educated at St. Andrews University, and in 1802 was called to a church in Roxburgh. From this vantage point he was able to observe the working of the English Poor Law and became so critical, that his opposition to it became the foundation of his later social work experiments. He was transferred to Glasgow, and from 1819 to 1823 took charge of the newly created Glasgow parish of St. John’s, where his charitable work became famous. He left to take up again University work, and by 1828 became Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh His profound interest in Church government brought him, four years later, to the position of Moderator of the Scottish Established Church, and in 1843, after years of difficulty as leader of the Disruption Movement, he became the first Moderator of the Free Church. He died suddenly in 1847 at a meeting of the Free Church Assembly, and was buried ‘amid the tears of a nation and with more than kingly honours’. A mathematician by training, an economist from interest, and a Church scholar by calling, Chalmers was not only a man of outstanding ability and an orator of a high order, but also a humanitarian with a wide social experience. He was known and honoured wherever English was read and spoken, and was the intimate friend of leading men and women throughout the United Kingdom.
He was a prolific writer on all the subjects that interested him, but though he wrote about and discussed his theories on 'Charity' for most of his life, the actual years spent in trying them out were limited to his four years in the parish of St. John’s. For the purpose of this study, therefore, we must confine ourselves to an analysis of his work during those four years, and an assessment of the legacy of social work theory he bequeathed to the nineteenth century.
Before his remarkable experiment was launched in 1819, he undertook and completed the monumental task of visiting and noting the circumstances of every family in the Tron Parish of Glasgow, containing about 11,000 people. To those of us accustomed to the work of the social surveys, the completion of such an enterprise, along with his parish work, in under four years, gives some indication of the vigour and pertinacity of the man. He found that while two-thirds of his parishioners had cast off every form and practice of religion, a surprising state of affairs for the early days of the nineteenth century, a large proportion were living a hand to mouth existence on poor relief, demoralized and friendless, and likely to remain so he thought as long as relief was administered legally. It was this conviction that led him to persuade Glasgow Town Council to create the new Parish of St. John’s in one of the poorest parts of the town, where he could try out his scheme of voluntary relief for the poor.
He was obliged to dovetail his new plan into the existing town scheme for the indoor and outdoor relief of the poor, which was administered by the ‘Town Hospital’ out of compulsory contributions from the citizens, in much the same way as English Poor Law operated. There was a further relief fund in Glasgow, Contributed voluntarily through the Churches and administered by the General Session (consisting of Clergy and Elders). There were therefore already in the parish a number of ‘Sessional’ and ‘Hospital’ poor who, if able-bodied, were receiving temporary ex gratia payments, or if not in that category were being ‘relieved’ in the same way as their English compatriots. With these he did not interfere, only stipulating that no new claimants should be relieved that way. Instead, he proposed the institution of an ‘Evening Collection’ fund, which would become the sole source of relief for the poor of the whole parish. The fund was deliberately kept small (it was provided by the evening collections at his church, attended mainly by local residents, and not by those at his morning service, which was largely attended by the rich of Glasgow, who flocked to hear him preach) and seldom reached more than £80 per annum, so that the deacons, who administered the fund, would not be tempted to give money too readily, and the human frailty of generosity with other people’s money would be restricted.
He divided the parish into twenty-five units, each under the care of a deacon, and each having some fifty families or about four hundred population under his care. It was the duty of the deacon to investigate and understand the circumstances of each individual who came to him for help. Having done this, each deacon must seek out what ‘natural resources’, as Chalmers called them, could be mobilized to solve the problem of those who came for help. First the applicant must be stimulated to industry to see if he could earn his own livelihood. Then his economy should be investigated to see if he could save more, or spend more wisely. If these two were insufficient, the relatives should be sought to see if they had anything to spare; and if help from this source also were not available or were insufficient, the case should be made known to the neighbours in the hope that by their joint effort over a short or a long time, the stigma of ‘pauperism’ might be kept from their friend and neighbour. Only if all this failed should the parish fund be used to succour those in need. Thus the deacon’s task was to encourage an esprit de corps among the families in his neighbourhood, so that it became a matter of honour and distinction to see that none should fall by the wayside. A deacon could also measure his success by having the least number of cases to bring before the Court of Deacons. These regular meetings of the deacons had three purposes: to exchange information and advice, that is to act in some ways like a Case Conference; to be a yardstick of the success of the scheme; and to administer a deterrent to incorrigible characters with whom other methods had failed. A ‘Paupers’ Roll’ was kept, and to have his name inscribed there was the worst stigma that could befall a person. To prevent this the Deacons’ Court was prepared to treat cases as ‘casualties’, almost as ‘first offenders’, and by giving a donation, and perhaps the help and advice of other deacons, would strive to set a man on his feet. Even so, crude gifts of money ‘without any meaning’ were discouraged, instead, they were designed to create that state of mind and body in which the individual would seek to fend for himself. Help was to have a moral and educational end, not a demoralizing one.
It is clear that the working of a project of this kind would depend greatly on the nature of the visitors chosen for the work, and here Chalmers was not without his notions of the characteristics of a good social worker—thus, in a letter from him to Mr. Campbell Nasmvth in December 1819, he wrote:
Be kind and courteous to the people, while firm in your investigations about them; and in proportion to the care with which you investigate will be the rarity of the applications that are made to you.... If drunkenness be a habit with the applicants, this in itself is an evidence of means, and the most firm discouragement should be put upon every application in these circumstances. Many applications will end in your refusal of them in the first instance; because till they have had experience of your vigilance, the most undeserving are apt to obtrude themselves; but even with them shew goodwill, maintain calmness, take every way of promoting the interest of their families, and gain, if possible, their confidence and regard by your friendly advice and the cordial interest you take in all that belongs to them.
On the whole he found the less well-off deacons did best, not because of any want of will on the part of the wealthy, but because, as he said,
the sight or knowledge of wealth inspires avarice in the mind of a poor man, and causes him, by a little more profligacy or a little more destitution, so to excite pity, that a permanent pension may be available. Moreover the possession of riches makes the wealthy more slothful in the carrying out of their principles.
Almsgivers were warned by Chalmers not to be promiscuous in their giving.
Better far, when giving, either to give personally and secretly having ascertained the nature of the need, and the justification of the request, shewing that it mean s personal sacrifice to them; or that giving to one may mean giving less to another who may be in sorer straits.
It has been suggested earlier that the greatest single factor influencing Chalmers to propound this new method of social work was his observation during his formative years, of English Poor Law in action, He saw in the system something that was not only demoralizing to the individuals who participated, but completely illogical in principle; and all his writings hark back to the dangers and folly of a legal system of poor relief. For such was the nature of man, he said, that given the sight of a bottomless pocket in the public fund, he would lose all incentive to strive for himself and his family, and would be encouraged to lie back and wait for public charity to support him. His experience had proved this to be so. Officials in England, according to him, cared little about the adequate investigation of the resources available, and were prone to accept too readily the misery in which a person lived, and to give relief accordingly, His view of officials was soured by what he saw, and he felt that officialdom dried up the springs of initiative and adventure in those who exercised it, As for the lack of logic, he argued that if a man had the right to a relief of his wants, why should this right not be fully, openly and cheerfully conceded to him. Yet in England the ‘almshouses approximate to a gaol and the house of charity to a house of correction’. The argument made to him by many that a rigorous style of administration kept down the expenses of poor relief made no appeal to him either. For, as he said, the restraints and humiliations hardened the finer and better spirits of the English peasantry, and led to an increased demand for this type of expenditure, with the additional burden of a moral injury done to the applicants who would be ‘more blunted in all their delicacies, more insensible to all their feelings, whether of honour or of natural affection, than heretofore’.
Though in some ways Chalmers was a leader of his generation, he was also a child of his time. Many of his assumptions were typical of his day. He accepted without question the rightness and inevitability of the existing class structure: He spoke of the ‘upper and gentle’ class and the ‘lower orders’, whom he described as of humbler condition to whom ‘Providence has assigned an inferior place in the scale of income and society’, and said that ‘the inequalities of life are often spoken of as artificial, but in truth they are most thoroughly natural’. Not that Chalmers wished to see the working man exploited. Indeed his whole aim was to create an ‘erect, sturdy, well-paid and well principled peasantry’ and to this end he encouraged any movement, such as Savings Banks, which would bolster up the moral fibre and proud independence of the lower orders. It was to character-building, rather than to material aid, he looked for the solution of an individual’s problem, and this was achieved only through Christian education. It might be logical, perhaps, to argue from this that man's character could easily be undermined, and that this danger was particularly present among the poor. In his view the poor could be easily corrupted by almsgiving, and it was the responsibility of the rich not to part with their gifts too easily.
While he had most likely read Eden's work on The State of the Poor, and Colquhoun on Indigence, nothing comparable to the scientific investigations into poverty, made by Charles Booth and his successors were available to him, so that his notions of the nature of the poor were the orthodox ones of his time. Poverty to him meant ‘when a man is in want of adequate means for his own subsistence’. It was relative, being different for a nobleman from a labourer. He accepted without question the divine saying, ‘The poor are always with you’, declaring that ‘no-one knows where poverty comes from’, but because it was there it must be accepted. Yet to argue from this, he said, that the State ought to step in and relieve poverty would be quite erroneous, the resources of ‘nature’ being sufficient. From this came his condemnation of the idea that every man has the right to a basic minimum.
Whatever the calls be which the poverty of a human being may have upon the compassion of his fellows, it has no claims whatever upon their justice—the proper remedy, or the remedy of nature for the wretchedness of the few, is the kindness of the many—but when a ‘right’ is introduced into this department of human affairs, then one of two things must follow: either an indefinite encroachment on property, or the disappointment of the people.
Though many of the principles and methods underlying Chalmers’ work are generally unacceptable today, they followed inevitably from his assumptions. His main aims were twofold; to abolish ‘pauperism’ and to promote ‘charity’. By ‘pauperism’ he meant the reliance in whole or in part on poor relief or the discreditable tendency of some to live on the gifts of other s in preference to honest work. By ‘charity’ he meant that benevolence which moved the giver to sift each case, even at the cost of self-sacrifice in time and energy, so that the relief forthcoming was the most likely to promote the moral character and the sturdy independence that was his chief aim. The benevolent were to be guided by what he called the ‘Four Fountains’. With the abolition of the Poor Law, Chalmers thought, ‘little rills of sustenance’, far more effective than any legal system, would flow over the land. The first and most important of these was ‘Self-help’. Without the demoralizing influence of doles, the individual would bestir himself to fend for his own. Self-reliance thus encouraged would soon raise a man out of his poverty and wretchedness and the whole community would be the better, for instance, in one district two young children were deserted by their parents. Had the children been taken at once upon the parochial funds, the ‘unnatural purpose of the parents’ would have been promoted. The helpless infants were therefore left to the neighbourhood, the deacon meanwhile making every endeavour to detect the fugitives. One of the parents was discovered and brought back; and the other, fmding his object frustrated, voluntarily returned. If self-help were impossible or insufficient, the second line of defence was the ‘Help of Relatives’, whose hearts would be opened and help stimulated if they saw their nearest kin in need. For example, an old and altogether helpless man sought parish aid. It was ascertained that he had very near relatives living in affluence to whom his circumstances were represented, and into whose unwilling hands, compelled to do their proper work, he was summarily committed. One wonders how both sides supported this propinquity! If this second method also failed, ‘the Help of the Poor for Each Other’ was the best third possibility. It was not the ‘amount of each gift that matters, but the number of gifts which, when added together gives a far more plenteous dispensation than from any other source’. A mother and daughter, sole occupiers of a single room, were both afflicted with cancer, for which one had to undergo an operation while the other was incurable. Nothing would have been easier than to have brought the liberalities of the rich to bear upon such a case; but this was rendered unnecessary by the willing contributions of food and service and cordials by those living round this habitation of distress. ‘Were it right’, asked Dr. Chalmers, ‘that any legal charity should arrest a process so beautiful?’ Only if these three had been tried and found wanting would Chalmers fall back on the fourth ‘Fountain’—‘Help from the Rich’. He was convinced that a legal poor relief put a barrier between the rich and the poor, and that its removal would open springs of spontaneous help from the rich.
One must remember that he clearly differentiated between ‘indigence’ and ‘affliction’. The former should be treated as described, but affliction such as blindness, insanity, etc., should be treated for what it was, and in many cases he thought an institution was the best solution. Nor was he opposed to the use of public money for the upkeep of such places, believing that adequate care should not be jeopardised through lack of funds. He was not even opposed to the use of public money in the home if it had a constructive purpose, as the following example showed. The father and mother of a family of six children both died. Three of the children were earning wages, three were unable to work. The three elder applied to have the three younger admitted to the Town Hospital. They were remonstrated with about the evil of breaking up the family. The offer was made of a small quarterly allowance if they would continue together. They yielded to the suggestion ‘kindly but firmly urged’.
Chalmers was always hostile to panaceas and to what he called ‘systems’ such as ‘the potato system or the cow system or the village system of Mr. Owen’. The scheme he fathered was certainly systematic and carefully planned, and was one of the first in this country to be so. It lasted for eighteen years, and at the first stocktaking, four years after the start, he recorded with pride some of its success. The average number of applicants in receipt of financial relief was one per district, ten had none at all. Each deacon received an average of five applications per annum, and spent about three hours per month investigating them. Thus was it proved, he said, that the springs of private charity, ‘so beautiful a part of man’s relations with man’ reduced pauperism almost to nothing. Evidence was not forthcoming on what the poor thought of the scheme, nor to what straits relatives and neighbours were put in caring for the less successful or healthy among them, nor on how many would have applied if there had been any hope of getting anything. Nor was there evidence of the rich accepting responsibility for the miseries of the poor in this typically working class area, except when individuals were asked for help in individual cases, so one may perhaps have some doubts about the success of his scheme, at any rate in human terms. On the other hand, Chalmers claimed that his poor did not migrate to other parishes where poor relief might have been available, but rather that his parish suffered an accession of poor from outlying districts. Whether his evidence was strictly accurate is not so certain. For the register he kept was of proved paupers, and while he knew of their movements, he knew nothing of those not on the register, who might well have moved out of the parish seeking help less rigorously administered.
The scheme collapsed in 1837 for several reasons. The first was financial, because though the Parish of St. John’s claimed not a penny piece from the Municipal assessment, it had to continue paying to the General Fund; secondly, the scheme aroused intense opposition and dislike from sources outside the parish; and thirdly, the influence of its founder was by then so far removed.
It would be idle to say that the Glasgow scheme of charitable endeavour either proved or disproved Chalmers’ theories about the nature of the poor, or the way to overcome poverty, but he started a school of thought, later developed by Octavia Hill, Denison, and Loch, which led to the C.O.S. movement and the technique of social work for which they stood. His main contributions to the new thinking included:
It is not enough that you give money, you must give it with judgment. You must give your time and attention. You must descend to the trouble of examination: for instance, will charity corrupt him into sloth-fulness? What is his particular necessity? Is it the want of health or the want of employment? Is it the pressure of a numerous family? You must go to the poor man’s sick-bed. You must lend your hand to the work of assistance. You must examine his accounts. You must try to recover those wages which are detained by the injustice or the rapacity of the master. You must employ your mediation with his superiors, and represent to them the necessities of the situation. Thus did he teach one of the fundamental tenets of all modern case-work.