Post-Office Insurance for Labourers. 
89 
securing their independence by their own exertion,* and from 
being encouraged and influenced to secure it. 
These insurances of sickness-pay and burial-money are taken for 
persons engaged in light or heavy labour, and not for cases in 
which there is more than ordinary risk. A percentage, to be 
settled by the value of the risk, must in such cases be added, and 
until such value can be ascertained with accuracy, we would 
decline all proposals for sickness-pay and burial-money from 
persons exposed to extra risk, taking of course their proposals 
for annuities. 
A rule may be given, for the purpose of dealing with 
members suffering under chronic and confirmed illness, to the 
following effect: — In case any member shall be disabled by loss 
of limb, or by blindness, apoplexy, palsy, or other injury, 
disorder, or disease, so as to be permanently incapable of any 
kind or sort of profitable employment, and such disability or 
incapacity be proved to the satisfaction of the Postmaster- 
General ; then such member shall receive a weekly allowance so 
long as sickness-jmy is due, not exceeding half the amount of 
sickness-pay contracted for, and not less than one-fourth of such 
amount. Should he recover, he shall be placed in the same 
situation in which he was when a healthy member, and his 
allowance as above shall in such case be withdrawn. In case of 
any member insured for sickness-pay being disabled by any sick- 
ness or infirmity which appears likely to disable him from 
following his usual employment, or any other profitable labour, 
the Postmaster-General shall have power to make an agreement 
with him for a weekly allowance to be paid to him in lieu of 
sickness-pay otherwise due, for a term, so that he may be, by such 
composition, at liberty to engage in easy work, at the expiration 
of which term he shall have no further claim on sickness-pay. 
The foregoing manner of dealing with such claimants, among 
whom will be found, if anywhere, the " malingerers," for whom 
the term should made of the briefest, and the persons who 
have a fair claim on relief or maintenance from the poor-rate, 
which in their case can entail no degradation on them, disposes 
of the difficulty of dealing with this class of illness. 
* It is no part of this paper to deal with the wages question. Like other social 
problems, an investigation would show that there is another question underlying 
it which must be dealt wiih before the wages can be placed on a satisfactory- 
footing. Where land is badly cultivated, from the system of small and penniless 
tenants, who scrape as much as possible out of it towards the end of their term of 
occupation, and " put nothing on," we find that both landlord and labourer fare badly. 
It would be well if such tenants could be gradually got rid of ; and the employment 
of more capital in agriculture is tending, though but slowly, to such an improve- 
ment. They would be t^etter oif as labourers than as tenants, both in point of less 
anxiety and less work. 
