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1704
GIVING ALMS NO CHARITY; DANIEL DEFOE'S
SEMINAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE GREAT NATIONAL DEBATE
ON PROVISION FOR THE POOR |
012. [DEFOE, Daniel.] Giving alms no charity, and employing the poor a
grievance to, the nation, being an essay upon this question, whether work-houses,
corporations, and houses of correction for employing the poor, as now practis' d in
England; or parish-stocks, as propos'd in a late pamphlet, entituled, A bill for the
better relief, employment and settlement of the poor, etc. Are not mischievous to the
nation, tending to the destruction of trade, and to encrease the number and misery of
the poor. Addressed to the parliament of England. London. Printed, and sold by the
booksellers of London and Westminster. 1704. 4to. ,[2],3-28p. Rebound in half calf,
marbled boards, vellum tips. An excellent copy.
MOORE 88. HANSON 446; KRESS 2419; GOLDSMITHS 4104. L, ReU; CaOHM,
CLU-C, DFo, InU-Li, MB, MH, MH-BA, NjP, NIC, NNC in ESTC.
Daniel Defoe's Giving Alms no charity, 1704, is one of the most important and
significant pamphlets ever issued on the treatment of the poor in Great Britain.
The idea of "putting the Poor to work" had dominated the thinking of philanthropists
and those concerned with social welfare in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
William III repeatedly suggested to the House of Commons that if "you can find
proper means of setting the poor at work, you will ease yourself of a very great
burden, and at the same time add so many useful hands to be employed in our
manufactures and other public occasions." In 1704 there were no fewer than four Bills
in Parliament designed to put the ideas thus sanctioned into operation. One of these -
the one mentioned by De Foe on his title page - was drawn up by the great capitalist
entrepreneur of the day, Sir Humphrey Mackworth. This met with almost universal
acceptance. The measure would have set up in each parish something like the "Publick
Workhouse" of Sir Matthew Hale and Sir Josiah Child, the "working almshouse or
hospital" advocated by Thomas Firmin and John Locke, in which, on materials and
working capital raised by the Poor Rate, all paupers able to work, whaterver their age
or sex, would have been offered employment for wages. If they refused they would
have lost their right to any relief and probably become liable to commitment to a
House of Correction. At the eleventh hour the project was killed dead by Daniel De
Foe who addressed to Parliament the telling pamphlet Giving Alms no charity. In
1705, at a later period of the same session of Parliament, the House of Lords threw
out Sir Humphrey Mackworth's Bill; and no similar measure has afterwards got
anything so close to success.
What Daniel De Foe threw into the discussion was the hardest possible stone of
economic disillusionment and worldly cynicism. He struck down at a blow the
compassionate efforts of those who he no doubt regarded as soft-hearted dupes of their
sentiments of pity.
In this pamphlet De Foe gives classic expression of the idea that intervention by
government in economic processes can be pernicious and harmful. Providing funds to
pay the poor to work steals employment from the rest of the working community and
in so doing undermines and distorts the true economy. In addition De Foe was
forthright in seeing poverty as often the fault of the poor and blaming the increase of
poverty on a deterioration of morals and an increase in idleness and extravagance. In
De Foe's opinion "'tis the Men that won't work, not the Men that can get no work,
which makes up the numbers of our Poor."
The idea of putting the poor to work was echoed in every succeeding generation. A
hundred years later, Coleridge and Southey, for example, were again urging that
employment be created as an antidote to distress. But whenever this happened De
Foe's voice echoed with equal and opposite force. The potency of De Foe's idea and
the effectiveness of his presentation of it are reflected in the fact that it was reading
Eden, and in Eden, Defoe's attack on public employment which helped to change
Malthus's mind on the poor law itself. In the 1798 edition of An Essay on the
Principles of Population Malthus did not urge the abolition of the Poor Law altogether,
but the establishment of a new national workhouse scheme. By 1803 when the much
expanded quarto edition of his work came out he had read Eden and De Foe and the
text of his work was changed to include a condemnation of Workhouses and
employment. All public employment, he repeated, by competing with the private,
merely maintained a pauper by putting a free labourer out of employment. With the
abandonment of the workhouse scheme came the famous plan for the abolition of the
Poor Law altogether.
De Foe, like Hanway after him, emphatically asserted that the strength of a nation
consisted in its population. Speaking of Elizabeth the Ist he says: "This wise Queen
knew that the numbers of inhabitants are the Wealth and Strength of a Nation.." In
consequence he was not opposed to an influx of immigrants, for example those fleeing
religious persecution in other parts of Europe, especially, if, as was often the case,
they were skilled craftsmen, tradesmen or merchants.
In addressing the problem of poverty De Foe is keen to make clear that he does not
consider England itself poor. On the contrary, thanks to the success of trades and
manufactures since the time of Elizabeth, "we are as Rich a Nation as any in the
World." The problem was that, rich though we were, we were "burthen'd with a
crowd of clamouring, unimploy'd, unprovided for poor People..."
De Foe argued that "There is in England more Labour than Hands to perform it, and
consequently a want of people, not of employment. " He would not admit that any man
who really wanted work would fail to find it: "No Man in England, of sound Limbs
and Senses, can be Poor meerly for want of Work." It follows that there should be no
such thing as begging: "So that begging is a meer scandal in General, in the Able 'tis
a scandal upon their industry, and in the Impotent 'tis a scandal upon the Country." In
other words since work is available the able-bodied have no need of begging and
should be ashamed to do it. The disabled or sick should have proper provision through
the parishes and never be put in the position of needing to beg. In this case the
charity which gives to beggars or vagrants is a mistaken one, it encourages begging
and does more harm than good. If beggars can so easily get a good living by begging,
why should they work? "As for the craving Poor, I am perswaded I do them no wrong
when I say, that if they were incorporated they would be the richest Society in the
Nation." True Elizabeth I brought in statutes against able-bodied beggars etc. but
these laws have not been sufficiently enforced: "...had they been severely put in
Execution by our Magistrates, 'tis presumed these Vagrant Poor had not so encreas'd
upon us as they have."
De Foe then proceeds to an attack on the make-work schemes. It is the job of the poor
to find work for themselves not for society to find work for them. The provision of
Workhouses in De Foe's view tended to encrease the numbers of the Poor and not to
relieve them. If poor children are put to work making Bays in London there is less
work for other poor families to do elsewhere: "For every piece of Bays so made in
London there must be a Piece the less made in Colchester." "But to set Poor people at
Work, on the same thing which other poor People were employed on before, and at
the same time not encrease the Consumption, is giving to one what you take away
from another, enriching one poor Man to starve another, putting a Vagabond into an
honest Man's Employment."
De Foe here seems to take the view that the market for goods is, after all, a finite one
and to have somewhat forgotten his former argument that there was not so much a
shortage of work as a shortage of hands to do it. More work to do than hands to do it
suggests a surplus of demand: there was, it seems, however no such surplus. Had
there been there would have been room, possibly, for the normal economy and make-
work schemes to tap the unexploited potential.
De Foe was no doubt correct in pointing out the harmful effects of artificially creating
employment but perhaps wrong, in wanting to place the blame for poverty on the poor
themselves, in stating there was no such thing as genuine unemployment.
De Foe makes it clear that his pamphlet is in no way concerned with the sick, the
infirm the aged or the disabled: "These as infirmities meerly Providential are not at all
concerned in this Debate; ever were, will, and ought to be the Charge and Care of the
Respective Parishes..." The existence of the able-bodied poor he puts down firmly to
their laziness, extravagance, improvidence and predilection for drink and in so saying,
returns to his former theme "Tis the Men that wont work, not the Men that can get no
work, which makes up the numbers of our Poor..."
As has been elsewhere pointed out De Foe offers no real solution to the problem of
the poor. His achievement was the negative one of successfully demolishing
Mackworth's scheme for workhouses. It set the tone for all those who, to this day,
suspect that all poverty is largely the fault of the poor and who stress the harmful
effects of state or charitable provision.
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