poor have always been more vicious, idle, and numerous than all others. There cannot be a doubt that the dislike of the poor, the eagerness to blame them for their poverty, which strikes foreigners as so strange in English people, had its birth in the great wrongs done them with respect to the land. Foreigners reproach us with making poverty a crime. We do so because poverty has been increased and perpetuated by a long series of land crimes—we are in possession of the lands of the poor, and we instinctively vilify those whom we have injured.
From this time, we shall find poverty in England becoming more and more unmanageable. For fifty years—until the 43 Elizabeth—no serious efforts were made to overtake it. Each new Act complains that the former has been evaded or disobeyed. The spoils of the monasteries were to provide for the defence of the realm, and there were to be no more subsidies; the chantry lands and the gild lands were to be devoted to "good uses,"—grammar schools, the augmentation of the universities, the relief of the poor. But the poor were never so miserable, public charity was never so grudging, destitution was never such a positive danger to social order, as when all these funds had been seized by the King for "good uses." Nor was the coinage ever in so disgraceful a state as when the Treasury seemed to be full to overflowing with the confiscation of one quarter of the wealth of the kingdom.
In the old days there was none of this overwhelming chronic misery, impossible to overtake; though there was no Poor Law, and no laws were passed to threaten the well-to-do with imprisonment if they would not relieve the poor. There were many wars and disturbances in those old days, and under a feeble or favourite-ridden king there were discontents ; but there was no great festering mass of pauperism. The religious houses found it easy to cope with the inevitable misfortunes of sickness, bad years, old age, and helplessness. There were the blind, the lame, the crippled; but there were not hordes of able-bodied men for whom their country had no use and no place.
We have but to study the Acts of Parliament to see that the destruction of small farms caused a mass of poverty and misery which terrified the rich, and made them first think of hanging the vagrants, and when this proved
