What it amounts to is the
removal of the mass of unemployed. The difficulties involved in such a
scheme are, as Mr. Booth admits, very grave.
The following points especially deserve attention--
1. Since it is not conceivable that compulsion should be brought to bear
in the selection and removal out of the ordinary industrial community of
those weaker members whose continued struggle is considered undesirable,
it is evident that the industrial colonies must be recruited out of
volunteers. It will thus become a large expansion of the present
workhouse system. The eternal dilemma of the poor law will be present
there. On the one hand, if, as seems likely, the degradation and
disgrace attaching to the workhouse is extended to the industrial
colony, it will fail to attract the more honest and deserving among the
"very poor," and to this extent will fail to relieve the struggling
workers of their competition. On the other hand, if the condition of the
"industrial colonist" is recognized as preferable to that of the
struggling free competitor, it must in some measure act as a premium
upon industrial failure, checking the output of energy and the growth of
self-reliance in the lower ranks of the working classes. No scheme for
the relief of poverty is wholly free from this difficulty; but there is
danger that the State colony of Mr. Booth would, if it were successful
as a mode of "drainage," be open to it in no ordinary degree.
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