where they dwell for maintenance." It proposed that instead of giving parish allowances both old and young should be set to work upon spinning, weaving, lacework, etc. It further ascribes the increase of the poor to the introduction of stagecoaches and consequent decrease of employment in connection with saddle-horses, an argument which foreshadows numerous arguments as to the effects of the introduction of machinery in later times.
In 1677 one Andrew Garranton proposes a heavy duty upon foreign commodities as a means of giving employment to the poor. The title of his work is "England's improvement by land and sea. How to outdo the Dutch without fighting, to pay debts without money, to set at work all the poor in England with the growth of our own lands." Andrew Garranton was the first of the Tariff Reformers.
Thomas Firmin, a philanthropic merchant of London, published in 1678 a letter to Archbishop Tillotson on "proposals for employing the poor." He had established a house of industry in Aldersgate in which he laid up "hemp and flax" for spinning and weaving, which he commends for imitation. He answers various hypothetical objections to his scheme, but there is one which he confesses himself unable to answer, viz., how to dispose of the manufactured goods. Sir F. Eden tells us that Firmin's workhouse had not a prolonged existence. Four years later Firmin confesses that it had "not been able to bear its own charges," and had been largely supported by charitable people. One feature of his scheme was that the work should be done in people's own homes. It would be "altogether unreasonable and unprofitable to bring people to a public workhouse," an early anticipation of the aversion to indoor relief. Firmin would
