The Development in England of a State System for The Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men The Development in England of a State System for the Care of the Disabled Soldier What shall be done with the disabled soldier? That all depends upon how he is valued. Shot, perhaps, if he is despised and dreaded like the old-time Chinese soldier recruited from the ranks of the bandits. Given a license to beg and turned loose on the public to test the brevity of a country's gratitude to its broken soldiers, if war has been his trade. From the military viewpoint he might as well be scrapped as a broken gear that clogs the fighting machine. But perhaps the gear can be mended and fitted into a nation's industrial machinery, if he be a citizen soldier who has left the plow or the lathe or the desk to uphold the priceless ideals of his country. The time has gone by when a Hôtel des Invalides or a soldiers' home filled with broken men rusting out in unproductive idleness can be the measure of a nation's gratitude to its gallant defenders. The dole of a pension bureau will no longer serve as a sop to a nation's conscience in an age of new spiritual valuations. An unproductive unit is a misfit in an industrial age, and misfits are uncomfortable things. They betoken carelessness and neglect. The exigencies of war cause many painful dislocations. Men who were productive units in the social organization are maimed in the machine of war and thrown back upon the nation that called them to the colors. The unavoidable responsibility rests upon the nation to make possible their return as far as may be to a life of productive activity in which alone they can be useful and happy members of society. This is the new consciousness which is gripping the nations whose manpower is wasting away under the bloody flail of Mars. How England has addressed herself to this herculean task is the subject of this study. The historical continuity of a nation's institutions and administrative methods make it un likely that even tasks of unwonted magnitude will cause it to suddenly leave the grooves of custom. Existing organizations will be loaded with new responsibilities and develop a new technique. Elimination of the useless and coordination of the useful will gradually produce a system in keeping with the ways of the people. The frank self-criticism of the English people may dub this process of trial and error as 'muddling through', but there can be no doubt that the principles they arrive at will be vitally important to this country whose institutions and ideals are so similar to those of its doughty ally. Fortunate, indeed, will America be if she can profit by England's experiences. THE HISTORICAL ROOTS The English system of caring for the disabled soldier is the outcome of leaving the care of the ex-service man in the past largely to voluntary philanthropic organizations. To be sure, England had a system of pensions based largely upon length of service and meritorious conduct. How inadequate these were may be judged from the fact that up to the present war the scale of pensions had not been changed in fifty years, nothwithstanding the rising standard of comfort and the increased cost of living. The enlisted man and his dependents fared particularly badly because the regular army and navy were recruited from the unmarried and the encumbrance of marital ties was frowned upon by the war office and admiralty. The professional soldier who might see service in Aden or Singapore or Jamaica was not thought the proper person to assume the apostolic prerogative to 'lead about a wife'. When his survivors and dependents fell upon troublous times after a campaign in the Crimea, or the Sepoy mutiny or a naval 199232 disaster, an appeal was made to the public for funds to supplement the inadequate provisions of the state. So numerous were these various special funds that Parliament designated a custodian for them which, after functioning for some years, came to be known finally, in 1903, as the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation,1 to whom new responsibilities of care and oversight were assigned at the outbreak of the present war, as we shall see later. The English had become so accustomed to the spectacle of philanthropic organizations supplementing the inadequate provisions of the government for its ex-service men that they had come to doubt that it was possible for the state to formulate rules that would be elastic enough to fit all cases. Certain minimum provisions readily executed by the dry mechanics of a government bureau sufficed as long as the human element was supplied by voluntary organizations endowed with heart and conscience. The opinion of the Right Honorable W. Hayes Fisher, for many years chairman of the executive committee of the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation, expressed at a hearing before the Select Committee on Naval and Military Services, late in 1914, illustrates this feeling. He said: "I He said: "I want to emphasize my own opinion drawn from long experience-an opinion I believe shared by all my colleagues-that unless the government fix a flat rate of pensions on an extravagant and wasteful scale, there will always be need of some body ancillary to the government departments to make supplementary grants and give additional aid, and, above all, to introduce into its administration the human element, if we are to avoid much unnecessary suffering."2 The best comment upon that opinion is found in the subsequent action of Parliament in establishing a uniform pension system on an adequate basis and supplying the element of elasticity in a scheme of alternative pensions, as we shall have occasion to see. It is a little difficult to reconcile the opinion quoted above with another statement made by the same gentleman before 1 First Report of the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation, 1904. 2 Special Report and Second Report from the Select Com- . mittee on Naval and Military Services, Proceeding of Committee and Minutes of Evidence, 1915, p. 247. the same committee in reference to the reconstruction of the Royal Patriotic Fund in 1903. He said: "I have always regretted that the government at that time did not take a bolder line, and put an end to the present system of administering state pensions and supplementary grants a system which was never created by one mind at one time, but is the mere product of chronology, and is, in consequence, complicated and chaotic." The government did take that bolder step in 1917. One of the 'ancillary' bodies-to use Mr. Fisher's term-which came to the rescue of the ex-service man before the present war was the Incorporated Soldiers and Sailors Help Society. It was established under royal patronage at the close of the South African War "to help Soldiers and Sailors by providing them with the name and address of a 'Friend' in each parish or ward throughout the Empire, to whom they may be commended on discharge from the Army or Navy for aid in obtaining Employment or other forms of Help suited to their needs."4 The older Tommy Atkins presented a harder employment problem than will the members of the new army. Army life in peace times offers few attractions to the industrial effective who can provide a home by the fruit of his labor. The man who is industrially unattached, or is disinclined to assume the responsibilities of that homemaking for which the English people are so noted, is the man who is most likely to follow the soldier's trade with its dangers and vicissitudes. And when he falls out of service through the expiration of his enlistment, or through disablement, he is not the easiest man in the world for whom to find employment. He is likely to be a man without trade skill or acquired habits of industry. So it is not surprising that the Soldiers and Sailors Help Society met with indifferent success in its efforts to find employment for ex-service men. The 'friends' who were listed on its roster seem to have been the easy marks for the professional tramps, according to the testimony of an ex-service man who did Ibid. p. 248. THE INCORporated Soldiers and Sailors Help SOCIETY: Regulations for office holders, p. 1. some tramping on his own account, armed with perfectly good discharge papers." However, the experiences of the Society led it to undertake a valuable experiment in reconstruction. The difficulty it experienced in finding work for disabled men led it to open workshops in London for the employment of handicapped men and their dependents. They anticipated by ten years the methods adopted by the principal belligerent countries in dealing with the problem of their disabled soldiers, namely, by special training. When the war came to enormously augment the task of the Society, a public appeal was made for funds with which to expand the work. Lord Roberts, the nation's military idol, evinced a lively interest in the work, and after his death the shops were called the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops. The object of the Society in conducting these shops is "to teach useful trades to men discharged as medically unfit, who, by reason of their disability, consequent on their service, are unable to take ordinary employment, and to make such cases, as far as possible, self-supporting, by disposing of the work they turn out." They are not, therefore, primarily vocational schools to train men by a short, intensive course to re-enter industry and maintain themselves in the field of open competition. While some do leave the shops and take positions elsewhere, it is expected that most of them will remain as permanent employees under work conditions favorable to the handicapped man. The workshops must be conducted upon a commercial basis, paying wages to its workmen and marketing the finished product. This the shops have been able to do with an encouraging degree of success. The advantage of such an institution is that it can afford steady jobs to sub-standard workers and can adapt machinery to the disabilities of handicapped operatives. The central workshops in London have operated at a profit and claim that the output of the factory has been largely W. G. CLIFFORD, The Ex-soldier, by Himself. London. 1916. The National Tribute to our Permanently Disabled Soldiers and Sailors. 7 THE INCORPORATED SOLDIERS AND SAILORS HELP SOCIETY: Annual report, 1915. absorbed by the wholesale trade entirely aside from charitable motives. The men are paid an initial wage of four pence an hour for eight weeks, and after that a minimum wage of one pound a week according to a man's capabilities. The need was seen of establishing branches in different parts of the country, to afford opportunities for disabled men in other than the London district and now there are workshops at Plymouth, Brighton, Colchester, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Belfast. Toy-making has been found to be a profitable industry, and the various processes afford work of many types for men with different disabilities. There is a division of labor between the different branches, one doing the woodwork, another the metal work, a third the printing, and so on. The workshops have dealt with 850 men disabled in the present war, and the Society has plans for a further expansion of the work so that four or five thousand disabled men can be employed at one time in the various workshops.8 While institutional care and specialized workshops will probably be needed in the case of grievously handicapped men, the principle is pretty clearly established that it will be better for the man, and for society, if he can be trained to meet the competition of the work-a-day world and maintain himself in the industries of his own locality. The institution which will commend itself as meeting the extraordinary requirements of war time, and after, will be the one which will be rather a vestibule, through which a large number of men may pass as rapidly as possible into the normal industries of a community, than a sheltering workshop of limited capacity with only a small exit to the field of competitive enterprise. FEELING ITS WAY The outbreak of the war found the British Government wholly unprepared to cope either with the problem of caring for the dependents of men called into service or for those who might be disabled. Fortunately, there was an Major Algernon Tudor Craig, Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors, Recalled to Life, London, 1917, I, 289–294. |