Nor was it an ambiguity for the political economist Adam Smith. Nor for the poor themselves who assumed that they had a right to 'fair wages' when they worked and to parish relief when they did not. Nor for the early Methodists who based their social gospel on the dictum, 'The poor are the Christians.' Nor for the philanthropists who founded scores of societies and institutions to minister to every kind of misfortune that could befall the poor. Nor for the mercantilists who devised ingenious means by which to convert the 'idle poor' into the 'industrious poor' for the greater benefit of the nation. Nor for the Elizabethan statesmen who devised the system of public, compulsory relief known as the 'poor laws,' which were meant to provide for all the poor, including, in certain situations and under certain conditions, the 'able-bodied poor.' Nor for the justices of peace who administered the 'laws of settlement,' which gave every legal resident of a parish a claim upon that parish for relief in case of need. It had not been an ambiguity for medieval churchmen who made the giving of alms to the poor – labouring or otherwise, 'holy' or 'unholy' – a sacred Christian duty. What they took to be an unfortunate ambiguity had been the accepted and perfectly acceptable reality for centuries. By rigorously distinguishing, in theory and policy, between the 'independent poor' and the 'dependent,' between 'labourers' and 'indigents' or 'paupers,' they hoped to eliminate the ambiguity that had done so much mischief.īoth of them appealed to tradition to support their distinctions. It was for the latter, he insisted, that the word 'poor' should be reserved – 'for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, for languishing and decrepit old age.' The poor law reformers used other language to make the same point. But it had been anticipated almost forty years earlier by Edmund Burke when he objected to the 'political canting language,' the 'puling jargon' of the expression, 'labouring poor.' The issue was not semantic it went to the heart of the conception of poverty and the image of the poor, of the 'social problem' as it was called, and of the social policies deemed appropriate to that problem.īurke's objection was to the confusion of genres implied in 'labouring poor,' the confusion between those who worked for their subsistence and were properly known as 'labouring people,' and those who could not work and were dependent on charity or relief. The phrase appeared in the Poor Law Report of 1834. 'The mischievous ambiguity of the word poor' – if there was a single theme dominating the discussion of poverty in the early nineteenth century, it was this.
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