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¬incapable of maintaining their children, have a claim to cast them upon the public as soon as they, arc born, and to live with them as inmates in those receptacles intended for the promotion of industry and the relief of want, but which, from the very nature of things, under the best management, become the abodes of vice and misery; where the aged, the diseased, the idle, and the profligate, the two first classes being everywhere out-numbered, are heaped upon one another, giving birth by their debaucheries to a new race of paupers, till they become " a kind of putrid mass above ground ; cor- rupted themselves and corrupting all about them." — To finish the picture of abuse : this enormous and still growing burthen is almost exclusively cast upon the proprietors and occu- piers of land, who ought least to be called upon to bear it, as neither their diseases nor their vices contribute in any kind of proportion to the aggregate of the poor. — The simplicity of a country life furnishes but a small contingent of either. — The vicious and the distempered ¬arc ¬
