One can only envy the clean conscience a society must enjoy that so infallibly locates the sources of social problems in those who suffer them. If poverty is a transgression, it is one of which British opinion makers have always been, to an extraordinary degree, innocent — they need hardly fear disadvantage if they should sometime be measured as they mete. Yet to accuse them of a lack of fellow feeling with the poor is clearly wrong. They assume in the poor emotions they find most estimable in themselves, notably love of country and love of family. We are assured of this by their confident use of the threats of forced emigration, and separation of families, in regulating the poor.
There was, as I have said, a Minerva fully armed, growing within the squamous limits of Booth’s undertaking, by which I mean, of course, Beatrice Webb, at that time still the parthenic Beatrice Potter, who, with her future husband, Sydney, would become the dominant spirit in the Fabian Society, the most characteristic and influential school of English socialism. She was the niece of Booth’s wife, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturing family, and her curious lot had been to have her education entirely at the hands of Herbert Spencer, exponent of Social Darwinism.
One is supposed to admire the Fabians, just as one is supposed to admire English socialism. The entire Fabian corpus reads as if printed in embalmer’s fluid. And, as with Marxism or Structuralism, the tediousness of the prose acts as a defense of the ideas expressed in it, since none but the devout can endure reading it.
Beatrice Webb wrote the chapter in Booth’s study devoted to the Jews of London. It is uncharacteristically lucid and evocative, and — by the standards of the whole work — eminently fair. Jews were clean, sober, literate, frugal, hardworking, debt-paying, and, relative to the larger community at least, independent. They were imbued with every grace Booth’s study was meant to measure, and Webb allows as much.
The late nineteenth century was a period of Jewish immigration to London from Russia and Poland. The Jewish community of London established a Board of Guardians to provide for their poor, who were of course very numerous. Not surprisingly, considering the mentality at work, this arrangement was attacked in the London press as creating Jewish pauperism — since to receive assistance has long had, in the British mind, a disastrous and nearly irreversible impact on the human character. This “demoralization” will obsess Beatrice Webb. That it is an authentic and important phenomenon she never seems to doubt, and no wonder, since it has been a part of the prevailing view of man and society in Britain over centuries. So the Jews, in the seemingly unexceptionable course of taking responsibility for their own poor, were seen to be creating a “pauperized,” that is, a demoralized or degraded, population.
Webb defends them, however. She says it is unfair to describe the providing of free funerals as proof of pauperization, because of the “peculiar solemnity of mourning and funeral rites among Jews, and the direct and indirect costliness” of them. Now, as it happens, nothing seems to have mattered more to the Gentile or Christian Londoner than his own or a relative’s funeral. Working-class people, even young children, joined “death clubs” to pay the cost of their own funerals which, even after the Second World War, in William Beveridge’s terms, behaved as a necessity. That is, people would keep up their payments through hell and high water. Booth reports that poor people felt it a point of honor to bury someone in the best style his savings would permit. In the previous century the bodies of deceased paupers had been dumped in open pits. This no doubt accounted for the passion of the poor for funerals, while establishing in the official mind a standard of economy never again to be attained.
One of the lesser Fabians will suggest that the cost of working-class funerals, to be assumed by the state, should then be lowered by introducing mass production of coffin handles. This is an early and characteristic example of the eagerness of British socialists to use state services to control and depress working-class consumption.
Again remarkably, Webb defends Jewish charitable practices on the grounds that they consist largely of “business capital of one kind or another, enabling the recipients to raise themselves permanently from the ranks of those who depend on charity for subsistence.” She does not conclude that the phenomenon of pauperism might be perpetuated among other Londoners by the meager and abusive charity they enjoy at the hands of their Christian nation.
Yet among the poor themselves there is a generosity so considerable as to defeat these philanthropists’ hopes of rooting out pauperism by controlling charity. Webb frets that, while the Jews can keep good records of those they relieve, “owing to the fact that our indigent parasites are to a great extent maintained by the silent aid of the class immediately above them, we can by no possible means arrive at an approximate estimate of the number of persons in our midst who depend on charitable assistance for their livelihood.” That these “parasites” avoid the legal status of pauper merely frustrates her. While they exist they offend.
After all she has said in their favor, the future Beatrice Webb cannot finally approve of the London Jews and their philanthropy. Despite its apparent success, it is socially destructive, because “if we help a man to exist without work, we demoralize the individual and encourage the growth of a parasitic or pauper class. If, on the other hand, we raise the recipient permanently from the condition of penury, and enable him to begin again his struggle for existence, we save him at the cost of all who compete with him …” The impact of the Jew is therefore finally destructive, “for the reader will have already perceived that the immigrant Jew, though possessed of many first-class virtues, is deficient in that highest and latest development of human sentiment — social morality.” Inured to deep poverty, he will underbid other workers without the restraints of “class loyalty and trade integrity,” thereby lowering wages—“without pride, without preference, without interests outside the struggle for the existence and welfare of the individual and the family.” These are the same people who, a few pages before, were faulted for their ready and substantial philanthropy.
Having documented exceptional independence and prosperity, she concludes sepulchrally, “In the Jewish East End trades we may watch the prophetic deduction of the Hebrew economist [she means Ricardo] fulfilled — in a perpetually recurring bare subsistence wage for the great majority of manual workers”—writing here for all the world as if Ricardo’s prophetic deduction were not fulfilled in every corner of Britain.
Consistency is not the point. The point is to discredit the phenomena of self-help and social mobility, to find positive harm in them despite any apparent good. That Karl Marx, an immigrant Jew in London, should have attached such value to these things in his final chapter of Capital seems natural enough in light of the community Beatrice Webb describes here. It is her view that has carried the day. “Marxists” cleave to her Ricardian definition of “class loyalty” as if it were an article of the true faith.
The rigors of the system Booth proposed, to end poverty in Britain by harrying the poorest out of existence and regimenting the class above them, are entirely compatible with socialist thinking as it developed in Britain and which he by no means unfairly associated with the poorhouse and the prison. In an essay included in Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by George Bernard Shaw and published in 1889, Annie Besant describes thus the mechanisms that will encourage workers to fulfill their duties when socialism is achieved: