Old Age Pensions And the Aged Poor a Proposal

Day, and so indeed it was, as at about the same time?a few months earlier?Canon Blackley published his famous article in The Nineteenth Century Review on " National Insurance." It has taken just twenty years for these first expressions of opposing methods, aimed at the same crying evil, to run their course. Very little has been added to them, but gradually the public mind has been filled with the consciousness of the evils which were so present to the minds of both Canon Blackley and Mr. Hookham, and with the weight of the arguments adduced by each in favour of one or other treatment of the subject?by insurance or by endowment. Prom each seed a great tree has grown. Under which of these trees shall we pitch our tent ? This question I have sought to answer, and I cannot conclude better than by quoting from the pamphlet, to which I have referred, some of the words in which the idea was first put forward. It had, Mr. Hookham tells us, been in his mind at that time for twenty or thirty years, and now at the age of 92 he may regard with satisfaction its gradual spread, and the hold it has obtained on theminds of others, and old man though he be, he may even hope to live to see action taken upon it by the legislature. He states his case as follows :? " I shall first take up a position which I believe cannot " be practically controverted?that under existing circum- " stances it is impossible for the labouring poor, and " I have in view more especially the agricult...