Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/490

470 POOR LAWS be examined closely here ; but what he says of the state of things at the period, evidently the result of his daily observations as a magistrate and inhabitant of Westminster, is too striking to be passed over. "That the poor are a very great burden and even a nuisance to the kingdom, that the laws for relieving their distress and restraining their vices have not answered their purposes, and that they are at present very ill provided for and much worse governed are truths which every man will acknowledge. Every person who hath any property must feel the weight of that tax which is levied for the use of the poor ; and every person who hath any understanding must see how absurdly it is applied. So very use less, indeed, is the heavy tax, and so wretched its disposition, that it is a question whether the poor or rich are actually more dis satisfied ; since the plunder of the one serves so little to the real advantage of the other. For while a million yearly is raised among the rich many of the poor are starved ; many more languish in want and misery ; of the rest, numbers are found begging or pilfering in the streets to-day, and to-morrow are locked up in jails and bride wells. If we were to make a progress through the outskirts of the metropolis, and look into the habitations of the poor, we should there behold such pictures of human misery as must move the compassion of every heart that deserves the name of human. What indeed must be his composition who could see whole families in want of every necessary of life, oppressed with hunger, cold, nakedness, and filth, and with diseases the certain consequence of all these ! The sufferings indeed of the poor are less known than their misdeeds ; and therefore we are less apt to pity them. They starve, and freeze, and rot among themselves ; but they beg, and steal, and rob among their betters. There is not a parish in the liberty of Westminster which doth not swarm all day with beggars and all night with thieves. " The observations of Dr Burn, a name known to every one who has considered the poor laws, whether as legislator, magistrate, or lawyer, followed in 1764. Although the suggestions and observations in his History of the Poor Laws are worthy of the highest attention to any one enter ing into an historical retrospect, it must suffice here to say that the result of his experience and knowledge was that the laws then in force should "stand as to the main" but -be rectified on two points begging, and the manage ment of the poor by overseers. Dr Burn says : " But how shall begging be restrained ? which by a kind of pre scriptive claim hath so long been accustomed to triumph above the laws. All sorts of severities, it appears, have been enacted against vagrants ; and yet they wander still. Nevertheless, one would hope the disease is not past all remedy. If it is, let us cease the unequal contention, and submissively give up our fortunes to the. next that comes with a pass, and tells us a justice of the peace hath so ordered it ; but let beggars and vagrants be doing. There is one infallible way to put an end to all this, and the easiest in the world, which consists merely in a non-feasance. Give them nothing. If none were to give, none would beg ; and the whole mystery and craft would be at an end in a fortnight. Let the laws continue if you please to apprehend and punish the mendicants; but let something also be done effectually against those who encourage them. If the principal is punished, it is not reasonable the accessary should go free. In order to which, let all who relieve a common beggar be subject to a penalty." As to the other "fundamental defect," as Dr Burn styles the leaving the management of the poor to overseers, the position of overseers and their action are so admirably painted, and the description so applicable to the mode of administration down to the reform of 1834, that the observations, written in a happy strain of irony, must be inserted. " As to overseers of the poor, it is time the law provides that they shall be substantial householders. But many a man may be a sub stantial householder who is not fit to be an overseer of the poor. And in fact the office goes by rotation from one householder to another, some perhaps tenants at rack rent, whose lease expires the next year, others ignorant and unexperienced, others not willing to charge themselves to disoblige their neighbours and all of them wanting to get over the office with as little trouble to themselves as possible ; and if any, wiser than the rest, projects anything for the common good his office expires at the end of the year and his labour is frustrated, and in practice the ollice of an overseer of the poor seems to be understood to be this: To keep an extraordinary look-out to prevent persons coming to inhabit with out certificates, and to fly to the justices to remove them ; and if a man brings a certificate then to caution all the inhabitants not to let him a farm of 10 a year, and to take care to keep him out of all parish offices ; to warn them, if they will hire servants, to hire them half-yearly or by the month, by the week or by the day, rather than by any way that shall give them a settlement, or if they do hire them for a year then to endeavour to pick a quarrel with them before the year s end, and so to get rid of them. To maintain their poor as cheap as possibly they can ; at all events not to lay out two-pence in prospect of any future good, but only to serve the present necessity ; to bargain with some sturdy person to take them by the lump, who yet is not intended to take them, but to hang over them in tcrrore-mif they shall complain to the justices for want of maintenance. To send others out into the country a begging (for why cannot they go as well as others they will mention, who are less able in body ?) and the feebler they are the more profitable will be their peregrination. To bind out poor children apprentices, no matter to whom or to what trade, but to take especial care that the master live in another parish. To move heaven and earth if any dispute happens about a settlement, and in that particular to invert the general rule, and stick at no expense. To pull down cottages. To drive out as many inhabit ants and admit as few as possibly they can ; that is, to depopulate the parish in order to lessen the poor rate. To be generous, indeed, sometimes, in giving a portion with the mother of a bastard child to the reputed father, on the condition that he will marry her ; or with a poor widow (for why should she be deprived of the comforts of matrimony ?) always provided that the husband is settled else where. Or if a poor man with a large family appears to be industri ous they will charitably assist him in taking a farm in some neighbouring parish, and give him 10 to pay his first year s rent with ; and if any of their poor has a mercantile genius they will purchase for him a box, with pins, needles, laces, buckles, and such like wares, and send him abroad in the quality of a petty chapman, with the profits whereof, and a moderate knack of stealing, he can decently support himself, and educate his children in the same industrious way. But to see that the poor shall resort to church, and bring their children there to be instructed ; to con tract with a master that he shall procure his apprentice at proper times to be -taught to read and write ; to provide a stock of materials to set the poor on work, to see the aged and impotent comfortably sustained, the sick healed, and all of them clothed with neatness and decency, these and such like it is to be feared are not so generally regarded as the laws intended and the neces sity of the case requires." Dr Burn s remedy was not to abolish overseers altogether, but that, while they or a permanent overseer should collect the rate, a general superintendent over a certain number of parishes should be appointed by the justices at sessions, and the disposal of the rate directed accordingly. How far the criticism and suggestions made, from those of Sir Matthew Hale downwards from time to time, in fluenced the legislation already indicated of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th, it is impracticable to discover. One thing is certain, that evils grew apace : ratepayers on the one hand, the poor on the other, political economists and philanthropists, magistrates and jurists, and observers of every kind were dissatisfied. For the general state of the poor in the beginning of the 19th century as presented to the accurately observant eye and ear of our English Juvenal, we glean more from his Borough than from a pile of statistics. Of the poor who were chargeable to the parish Crabbe says : " To the most we give A weekly dole, and at their homes they live." Of the workhouse or house of industry, " the pauper palace which they hate to see," he speaks mournfully. In prose he wrote of the poor who " must be considered in every place as a large and interesting portion of its inhabitants," condemning the workhouse system, alike the pauper palace and the house rented for the poor, the " House that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door." A closer examination of the system of maintaining the Enu poor than c^uld be obtained by casual visitors, or even tion constant residents having no special duty to examine or .^ ( inquire, showed, in full accord with the public criticism evi ] t already examined, and in spite of it, that the fund which the famous statute of Elizabeth directed to be employed in setting to work children and persons capable of labour,

but using no daily trade, and in the necessary relief of