Glimpses into the Abyss

If we take the history of any country we find that human life has covered it at different times much as geological strata cover the face of the earth. In Victoria Cave, Settle, for instance, human remains and relics of the corresponding animal and social life were actually found stratified. If you take the lowest stratum of society in any country the aboriginal man was, and still is, in countries where aborigines survive, a vagrant. The nomad is the foundation stone of human society.

He is therefore a survival, and should be treated as such.[2] So long as mankind was nomad, the only way in which a man could be a vagrant in the modern sense of the term would be by some crime that excluded him from the companionship of his fellows like that of Cain. A man with his hand against every man would be a vagrant. A whole tribe might become vagrant relatively to other tribes, as the Bushmen of South Africa, or the gipsies of all countries.

As civilization proceeded they remained as representatives of a prior stratification of humanity.

As by degrees men became pastoral and acquired flocks and herds, the man of no possessions would be relatively left behind as the unabsorbed nomad. But the world was wide, the best land alone was appropriated, and even when England had become largely agricultural there was plenty of room for Robin Hood and his merry men, and doubtless countless others, to lead the nomad life.

Though the great majority of the population was settled on the land, there was an amount of authorised travelling that, relatively to the facilities for travel, was considerable. Pilgrimages to shrines and military expeditions and merchants' journeys led many on to the roads with money in their pouch, and the less wealthy could make use of the hospitality of abbeys. Fuller describes the old abbeys as "promiscuously entertaining some who did not need and more who did not deserve it" ("Church History," ed. 1656, p. 298). Even the funds of the Church did not suffice for the number of people roaming the country in idleness and beggary, as by degrees the country became settled, land enclosed, and the opportunity for sustenance by a vagrant life less and less certain.[3]

As far back as the reign of Richard II., in 1388, it became necessary for the protection of society to legislate against vagrancy.[4] The natural thing when society was almost wholly agricultural, and stationary in villages or towns, was to legislate against and forbid vagrancy. Beggars impotent to serve were to remain where the Act found them, and be there maintained or sent back to their birthplace. This is the germ of the law of settlement, by which every Englishman was supposed to have a birthright in his native parish. The laws were made stricter and stricter, yet vagrancy did not cease, even when the penalty was whipping, loss of ears and hanging for the third offence.[5]

Even now society does not recognise that units squeezed out of true social relationships must become vagrants, as surely as soil trodden on the highway becomes dust.

The amount of vagrancy, i.e. of those obliged to revert to primitive conditions, depends as surely on the drying up of means of sustenance as the highway dust on the absence of refreshing showers.

Any change in society that displaces a large number of units is sure to result in increase of vagrancy. Of those forced out many cannot regain a footing if they would.[6]

But as time went on another class was added to the nomad as akin to it, and yet its origin is wholly different. The man unable to settle because of his affinity to a roving life is one thing, the man squeezed out of the pastoral or agricultural life is another. The latter is akin to our "unskilled labourer," a social unit unfitted for any but a primitive kind of existence, unfitted for industrial development, but not essentially nomad.[7]

As early as Henry VIII., 1531, we find a second class, that of the "incapable," those who could not work, who were "licensed to beg."

The formation of this class was accelerated by the failure of the Church to provide for the assistance of the poor, by suppression of abbeys, etc., at the same time that the abolition of villeinage, which was still recent, threw off from organised society dependents very unfit to live a self-supporting life. (See Note 2.) Thus again the drying up of means of subsistence created as it were another layer of easily drifting dust.

These two classes, that of the "poor, impotent, sick, and diseased," i.e. the incapable, and of the "lusty," form the foundation of our Poor-law system.[8]

It is thus seen that changes in the social organisation left behind another stratum to be provided for by legislation. So long as the half-feudal, half-ecclesiastical framework of society existed, there was nutriment for the individual who was left stranded. He was shepherded in some way or other either by church or lord. But when social change left him unshepherded the charge fell on the nation as an organised unit. The Poor Law began. The necessity for it arose at once when "all parts of England and Wales be presently with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars exceedingly pestered, by means whereof daily happened in the same realm horrible murders, thefts, and other great outrages."

Since, therefore, a transition period leaves behind such a layer of social débris, it is only to be expected that we should find the third great change that has passed over society, which is still recent, namely, the change to the industrial epoch, to be productive of another layer of social débris or dust.