ABSTRACT
In the last chapter it was pointed out that insurance was an attack on the principle that social services were for the irresponsible, for with compulsory insurance the question of responsibility just did not arise and the responsible and the irresponsible were to be treated alike. Even in the few industries covered by the I9II Act the numbers of workers covered were large enough to ensure that no distinctions of this kind could be made, and it had to be assumed that everyone would make the best use of the benefits that he received. Thus the door was opened to the universal social service, and later experience was to show that, on the whole, such services were not much abused. The other side of the picture showed a self-supporting social service which was popular with those for whom it was designed, and for whom it provided a benefit which they could regard as their right. It was this that probably gave the
insurance system its greatest strength, for to those who needed aid it could now come without the personal and paternal link that was regarded as essential by so many philanthropic theorists of the nineteenth century-'charity' had gone and a right had taken its place. It is unfortunate that a noble word had been so debased during the nineteeth century that it had to be repudiated in the twentieth, but Victorian charity had become so riddled with class feeling that the poor had been seen as a somewhat alien group. This meant that much of the charity dispensed by the middle-classes ignored, or just did not see, that a right can enhance human dignity whereas dependence can destroy it.
