h it is to be rather creditable than otherwise
to resort; a fund which is intended to deal, not with exceptional
calamity, but with that which springs from the mere efflux of time,
and which is, beyond all others, the most normal and most easily
foreseen. It proposes to teach the whole working population to look to
the State, and not to themselves, for the provision for their old age,
and for the old age of those who might be dependent on them, and thus
to destroy the most powerful of all motives to thrift--the very
mainspring of productive and self-sacrificing industry. And it
proposes to do this at a time when wages are higher than they have
ever been before; when voluntary societies for securing the poor from
want are flourishing and increasing as they have never done before;
when the rapid decline of pauperism is one of the most marked and most
universally recognised signs of national improvement. Can it be
seriously believed that the addition of many millions a year to the
State funds directly employed in the relief of poverty will, in the
long run, tend to diminish pauperism or to encourage self-reliance and
thrift?

Mr. Chamberlain and the other more considerable advocates of old-age
pensions clearly see that if such pensions are to be of real value
they must discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving; and
they believe that they may have the effect of stimulating, instead of
weakening, thrift. For this purpose several schemes have been devised.

The most popular Continental method of achieving this end is by a law
obliging the working man in early life to insure against old age, and
by supplementing the income derived from this insurance by a State
subsidy. In Germany, where this system is actually carried out, the
old-age pension is derived from three sources--viz. compulsory
insurance by the workers, compulsory contribution by the employer, and
a State subsidy. Compulsory insurance found for many years a powerful
English advocate in Canon Blackley; and it has been recommended by a
recent inquiry in Holland, which, however, refused to propose any
system of old-age pensions. According to the best accounts, the German
system has been far from successful either economically or
politically; and it has certainly not prevented Socialism from
becoming one of the great dangers of the State. Into this question,
however, it is needless to enter, as it is now universally admitted in
England that compulsory in