1 It is undoubtedly true that when Bentham engages with detail in the plan of his pauper panopticon he displays an almost fanatical enthusiasm for deriving value from every scrap of labour, and for the most obsessional cheese-paring. He is also quite explicit about the origins of the profit margin of the National Charity Company; they are to be derived from the systematic exploitation of child labour. Without discussing these issues at length, one observation might be made. The reinstatement of the link between labour and subsistence with regard to the indigent lies at the core of Bentham's philosophical position with regard to poor relief. The conditions of relief are intended to facilitate the employment of labour which, for myriad reasons, is unemployed, or which cannot generate sufficient income, though employed, to maintain itself. The creation of the circumstances in which that labour can be employed requires the collection, organisation and detention ofthat labour. It requires a national, sophisticated structure, a supplement to the open labour market, precisely because that labour market issues, so far as the indigent are concerned, in their exposure to starvation. Any such structure will be expensive, potentially ruinously so. It is certainly Bentham's contention in 1797 that government administration of his scheme would indeed be inefficient and wasteful, yet the private management of indigence is not essential to Bentham's poor law proposals.
As L. J. Hume pointed out, in his Bentham and Bureaucracy, Cambridge, 1981, Bentham viewed contract management as appropriate for many concerns in comparison with the inefficiency of government administration, as it existed. However, Bentham did foresee the situation in which government should assume control over the administration of Industry Houses. For the present, having opted for contract management, it behoves Bentham to establish that such a concern can be run at a profit, and his efforts to establish just that constitute perhaps the major theme of the published Outline of a work entitled Pauper Management Improved (The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John, 11 vols., Edinburgh, 1838–1843, viii, 369–439Google Scholar). Economy as the object of justice may imply that the system of Industry Houses should break even, in the sense that the indigent should meet the cost of their own relief, as far as possible. Economy as the means to profit is implied by the assumption that only private management can erect and administer a structure complex enough to minister to the needs of indigence without injustice to the self-maintaining, since private management requires the incentive of profit.
