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ON THE POOR LAWS.

ENGLAND is perhaps the only nation in the world which directly undertakes the maintenance of its poor at the public expense. It is an honourable distinction, which has obtained for this country the general admiration of the rest of Europe. The plan devised by the wisdom of our ancestors doubtless appeared to them to promise the most complete success. By giving the poor a legal claim to the aid of the rich, it was designed that they should no longer be dependent on precarious charity. But experience bas proved that the measure is in itself productive of the most serious evils. It not only operates to diminish the activity of private benevolence, but it has increased the numbers of the poor to an alarming

amount.

In the early history of this country, such was the wretched state of servitude in which the labouring portion of the people was involved, that, as slaves of the soil, the aged and the helpless depended on the church, or on the capricious bounty of their lords, for support. Poverty and disease had little hope of assistance from individual charity; and but for the ministers of religion, they must often have perished under those calamities which are incident to their

degraded condition. The ample revenues of the church afforded extensive means of assisting the destitute; and to the honour of Christianity, great numbers were relieved and supported, as they still are in Catholic countries, by the wealthy monasteries and other pious institutions which existed throughout the kingdom previous to the Reformation. Although we cannot be sufficiently grateful for that most important event, which brought to light the pure spirit of the gospel, obscured for ages by the dark errors of the church of Rome, the sudden dissolution of the monastic orders throughout England withdrew the principal source of supply by which the most miserable part of the community had been so long maintained,

and left the unhappy sufferers to the uncertain relief of individual charity. In this emergency, multitudes of necessitous persons perished for want of common sustenance. Contagious diseases, which never fail to follow close in the train of famine, swept away vast numbers more; and thus ensued an alarming diminution of the population of the whole kingdom, which called upon the state for some immediate interposition.

The early laws enacted for the benefit of the poor are, for this cause, principally directed to the encouragement of population, and the increase of agricultural labourers; the great want of hands at that period being such as to leave the proprietors without adequate means of cultivating their farms.

These enactments provided for the maintenance only of such persons as were incapable of maintaining themselves; and contained the severest penalties against vagrancy, which was punished by slavery, mutilation, and even by death, though these terrible statutes were afterwards repealed by King Edward Vl. The Act of the 3d of Queen Elizabeth appoints receivers in the several parishes to collect alms for the poor; imposes a tax, to be levied at the quarter sessions, on all persons who refuse a reasonable contribution for their relief; and, in cases where the funds so collected were unequal to provide for all the helpless, a portion of them received a licence to beg alms elsewhere. Another Act of the 43d year of her reign embodied all the existing laws for the maintenance of the poor, and forms the foundation of the statutes now in force.

No exact returns of the produce of the fund raised for the support of the poor throughout England were made previous to the year 1776, when the attention of Parliament was earnestly directed to the consideration of this highly important subject. The sum expended in that year for the relief of the poor of England and Wales, amounted to £1,556,804. Such has been the rapid increase of paupers since that period, notwithstanding all the efforts made for the improvement of their condition, that, in the year 1819, the expenditure

under this head amounted to no less a sum than £7,468,384, as appears by the official returns from the respective parishes.

Although the population of England and Wales increased during these 43 years, from 7,500,000 to nearly 12,000,000, this advance bears no proportion to the enormous demands upon parish relief; for while the inhabitants have thus increased little more than a third, the number of paupers, as above stated, amounts to nearly four times the proportion relieved in 1776. This alarming fact, being of the most serious importance, engaged the minute investigation of both houses of Parliament during the session of 1817. Their reports contain a most valuable body of information, obtained from the evidence of the most experienced persons in different parts of the kingdom; and their opinion as to the danger to be apprehended from this fatal increase of pauperism, may be collected from the following extract from the Report of the House of Commons:

"Unless some effectual check be interposed, there is every reason to think that the amount of the assessment will continue, as it has done, to increase, till, at a period more or less remote, according to the progress the evil has already made in different places, it shall have absorbed the profits of the property on which the rate may have been assessed, producing thereby the neglect and ruin of the land, and the waste and removal of other property; to the utter subversion of that happy order of society so long upheld in these kingdoms."

While the nation has been advancing from year to year in wealth and power,-while the increase of commerce, the improvements in agriculture, and the extension of our manufactures, afford the most convincing proofs of the national prosperity, it may naturally excite the wonder of many of our readers, why, with all these advantages, pauperism should have increased among us in a still more rapid progression? The explanation may be given in a single sentence: The Poor Laws have created the very evil they were designed to lessen. Greatly is it to be la

mented that the mode of administering relief to the helpless poor should ever have been taken out of the hands of individuals. But our ancestors acted from principles of the purest benevolence. In making the contribution general, they provided against the injustice of allowing the whole burthen of charity to fall upon the willing giver, while the penurious and the unfeeling withheld their support. Nor was it foreseen, that, in the gradual operation of the Poor Laws, numbers of the idle and profligate would be permitted to partake of that fund which was designed only for the aged and impotent. The establishment of workhouses, while it afforded an asylum to the feeble, was designed to give employment to children and other persons who were without support. So long as the relief was bestowed only on those in the work-house, there was a limit to such expenditure, strengthened by the popular disgust to such establishments; but when relief was, with the most benevolent purpose, extended to paupers at their own homes, it opened a door to imposition, and invited numbers to solicit parochial aid, who had hitherto maintained themselves. The industrious man began to perceive that some of the idlest of his neighbours thus contrived to obtain, at the parish expense, most of the comforts which he earned with difficulty by the sweat of his brow. Thus discouraged in his exertions to preserve his independence, the shame of soliciting support being also much diminished by the number of his neighbours receiving it, he fell into the same practice, and thus added himself to the list of those who already burthened the public. The labouring man began to look forward without anxiety for a provision for his family. He was tempted to contract an early or imprudent marriage, trusting to the support of the parish, in the time of need. He no longer strove to lay by for a wet day;" he provided nothing against age and sickness; and knowing that the poor-house could not now contain them all, he had little apprehension of spending his last days within the cold and dreary walls of that hateful building.

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A practice of relieving persons according to the number of their families now prevails in some parts of England, which has very materially tended to the increase of pauperism, by giving support to many individuals perfectly competent to their own maintenance. In such places, it frequently happens that an idle fellow purposely quarrels with his employer, and then repairs to the parish officers, stating that he is out of work, that he has so many children,—and accordingly receives such an allowance as in many cases puts him on a level with a more industrious labourer, who, by his utmost exertions, is striving to gain an honest livelihood for himself and his children. It cannot be expected that this should prevail without manifest injury to morals as well as to the public purse. It operates as a bounty upon idleness and profligacy, and tends to discourage the exertions of the well disposed, when no longer distinguished either by profit or by reputation. A large family, which to a good man is a source of anxious affection, becomes, under these circumstances, a fund of profit to the idle and indifferent, who carry the parish allowance to the public-house, while the wife and children, in whose names it is solicited, are abandoned to want and misery.

The effect of all this is to lead to universal pauperism. It was stated in evidence before the House of Commons, that in more than one district the poor-rates had increased to such an amount as to swallow up the whole rental of the property, the owners of which had been compelled to relinquish their farms or shut up their houses; thus rendering wholly unproductive that property on which the rates were levied.

In the township of Manchester, the annual poorrate, so long ago as 1816, amounted to no less a sum than £130,000; but so heavy was the pressure upon the smaller proprietors, that had the payment of their portion of the above sum been enforced, they must have been driven to absolute distress. This class of contributors was therefore excused to the

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