I hear in those days in good
Conservative homes declaring they would rather go to prison than
"lick Lloyd George's stamps." Most Liberals, on the other hand,
regarded the Act as an example of enlightened legislation for the
benefit of the poor. The _Eye Witness_ saw in it the arrival of the
Servile State. Their main objections cut deep. As with compulsory
education, but in much more far-reaching fashion, this Act took away
the liberty and the personal responsibilities of the poor--and in
doing so put them into a category--forever ticketed and labelled,
separated from the other part of the nation. As people for whom
everything had to be done, they were increasingly at the mercy of
their employers, of Government Inspectors, of philanthropic
societies, increasingly slaves.

What was meant by the Servile State? It was, said Belloc, an
"arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the
families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour
for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the
whole community with the mark of such labour." It was, quite simply,
the return of slavery as the condition of the poor: and the
Chesterbelloc did not think, then or ever, that any increase of
comfort or security was a sufficient good to be bought at the price
of liberty.

In a section of the paper called "Lex versus the Poor" the editor
made a point of collecting instances of oppression. A series of
articles attacked the Mentally Deficient Bill whereby poor parents
could have their children taken from them--those children who most
needed them and whom they often loved and clung to above the others,
and a Jewish contributor to the paper, Dr. Eder, pointed out in
admirable letters how divided was the medical profession itself on
what constituted mental deficiency and whether family life was not
far more likely to develop the mind than segregation with other
deficients in an Institution.

To the official harriers of the poor were added further inspectors
sent by such societies as the National Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children. Cruelty to children, as Gilbert often pointed
out, is a horrible thing, but very seldom proved of parents against
their own children. The word was stretched to cover anything that
these inspectors called neglect. Lately we have read of a case, and
many like it were reported in the _New Witness_, where failure to
wash children adequately was called cruelty.