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while, as a result of the social legislation of the present century, special provision has been made for assisting a number of separate classes in certain contingencies . . . the Poor Law remains the only system which is universal in its scope. Its purpose is the relief of destitution in the widest sense of the term, and it is founded on the recognition on the part of the community of a legal responsibility, exercised through local authorities administering local funds on a discretionary basis, to provide for its members a last resort against the final extreme of want. (Cmd. 2011, pp. 8, 9.)

“A last resort against the final extreme of want." No better description could be given of the scope and purpose of the English Poor Law. For more than three hundred years the provision of that" last resort "has been accepted by the English people as a legal and moral obligation, which has been adequately discharged by those who have acted as almoners on their behalf. But the system of relief has never been regarded with complete satisfaction. It assumed "destitution "-however that term was interpreted. "Destitution" had to be proved before relief could legally be given. No effort was made by the State-save in the case of children to avert the condition precedent to relief, and comparatively little thought was given to curative measures for restoring to normal health those who were attacked by the disease of pauperism. Like tuberculosis, it was practically regarded as an incurable, and largely as an hereditary, disease.

Nor is it remarkable that the methods adopted for dealing with the disease should have been empirical rather than scientific. Critics are apt to forget that the English people were confronted by the problem of destitution at an exceptionally early stage in their social evolution. In most other countries the problem was postponed by the survival of serfdom. A system of slavery, or even of serfdom, precludes the necessity for provision against destitution. Pauperism is a part of the price which England had to pay for the social and economic emancipation of her peasantry. The peasants who, towards the end of the fourteenth century, rose in revolt under Wat Tyler, claimed their freedom. They attained it; but they lost their land, and with it the surety of subsistence. Consequently Parliament found itself compelled, within a few years of the Peasants' Revolt, for the first time to legislate on the subject of vagrancy. Whether this meant, on balance, gain or loss, the fact remains that the mass of the English peasantry attained personal liberty four hundred years earlier than

the corresponding class in continental countries. On the other side of the account is the not less striking fact that whereas in France, in large parts of Germany, and elsewhere, great numbers of the actual cultivators have throughout the ages, remained attached to the soil by ties of ownership or quasi-ownership, in England the agrarian hierarchy has for centuries consisted of landlords, tenant-farmers, and landless wage-paid labourers. As early as the fourteenth century the English villein preferred wages to subsistence; consequently, the break-up of feudalism did not issue here, as elsewhere, in peasant proprietorship; it initiated the problem of destitution.

That problem was accentuated in the sixteenth century. Whether the prevalence of distress among the poor in that period can properly be attributed-as it commonly is-to the dissolution of the abbeys is, indeed, a moot point. Old Fuller asserted that "those abbeys did but maintain the poor which they made." Writing in 1656—about 120 years after the suppression of the monasteries--he said: "We may observe that generally such places wherever the great abbeys were seated, swarm most with poor people at this day, as if beggary were entailed on them, and that laziness not as yet got out of their flesh which so long was bred in their bones." It may well have been so; the monasteries had for centuries past afforded the most accessible means of poor relief, and their suppression undoubtedly threw a good many vagrants on their own resources and intensified, if it did not create, a serious social problem.

Other contemporary causes probably operated even more directly the transition from arable cultivation to pasturage; the concentration of farms and the growth of enclosures; the debasement and depreciation of the currency-all these things contributed to the prevailing distress among the poor. The Tudor government made valiant efforts to counteract the effects of economic tendencies: they attempted by legislation to restrict enclosures and encourage tillage; they passed statutes of ever increasing severity against "valiant beggars" and "lusty vagabonds"; by the famous Statute of Apprentices (1563) they tried to fix a scale of prices to secure to the labourer a minimum wage and regular employment, and to compensate for the decadence of the guilds by a uniform system of apprenticeship. Queen Elizabeth renovated the currency which her father had debased;

she stimulated private charity and encouraged voluntary almsgiving. But all to little purpose; economic tendencies were too strong for legislation, and in 1601 the State took the bold step of accepting direct responsibility for the maintenance of all citizens who would not or could not maintain themselves.

From 1601 to 1834 our system of public relief was based upon the principles implicit in the Elizabethan Poor Law. That famous Statute sharply discriminated between the "lusty and able of body," who were to be "set on work," under conditions not far removed from penal, and the impotent poor who were to be relieved and maintained. For the sick and infirm poor-houses were to be provided; the children whose parents could not support them were to be apprenticed to trades, the boys up to the age of twenty-four, the girls till they were twenty-one or married. The parish was adopted as the area of relief which was administered by overseers under the control of the Justices of the Peace. The funds were to be raised by a compulsory rate levied on all the householders of the parish, which thus became legally responsible for its own poor. No central organization existed until 1834.

But a question presently arose: "Who are the poor of the parish?" The answer was forthcoming in the famous Act of Settlement (1662), which provided that, on the complaint of the overseers, the Justices might, within forty days of any person's coming to live in a strange parish, order him to be removed back to his own place of settlement, unless he could give security to his new parish against becoming chargeable to it. Later on, this Act was the object of severe denunciation by Adam Smith and others. Unquestionably it did immobilize labour and lead to the harsh treatment of poor persons in search of better conditions of work; but the inconveniences were not acutely felt until the Industrial Revolution and the consequent demand for labour in the urban districts. By that time we had reached a new and very critical period in the history of the English Poor Law.

For the greater part of the eighteenth century little fault could be found with the administration of poor relief. Yet the great Act of Elizabeth, appropriate as it was to an era of paternal despotism and rapid economic transition, might have wrought mischief but for the prudence with which it was administered. In 1688 the poor rates amounted to only about £700,000 in a population of some 5 millions; or about 2s. 6d. per head. After

the rates mounted rather rapidly until in 1723 an Act (9 2. 1. c. 7) was passed which provided for an enlargement o. the

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of relief by the formation of unions of parishes, for the workhouses, and the virtual imposition of a "work

The results were so far satisfactory that by 1760 te amounted to something less than 3s. 7d. per head ulation. Sixty years later (1803), however, it had 101d.

vas some excuse. Much had happened in the interval. test economic revolution in world-history the face of d been literally transformed. Almost in the twinkling social system which had subsisted for centuries was : yeomen and peasants flocked into towns; handre collected in factories; iron-smelters deserted the ld for the Black Country, and Bradford-on-Avon le of place to Bradford-on-Aire as the centre of the ustry. On the top of the industrial and agrarian esere supervened twenty years of war. The coincidence

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ble. Administrators were confronted by an unpreduation. They were genuinely perplexed and alarmed; w of the resulting legislation was inspired by a combination of panic and philanthropy-by fear lest the scenes of the Terror might be re-enacted in London, by anxiety to relieve the suffering inflicted upon the weakest economic class by the rapidity of economic transformation. Already a breach had been effected in the administration of the Poor Law. Gilbert's Act (1782) was a permissive measure which, if locally adopted, authorized the overseers to dispense with the "workhouse test" and to make allowances in aid of wages to able-bodied labourers.

The principle thus tentatively recommended was carried further (1796) by a resolution of the Berkshire magistrates sitting at Speenhamland, near Newbury. This resolution, known as the Speenhamland Act," recommended the farmers to raise wages in proportion to the increase in the price of provisions; if they refused, the deficiency was to be made good out of the rates. The principle thus proclaimed was, a year later, embodied in and made compulsory by the Act of 36 George III. The workhouse test went by the board; work was found for the workless, and allowances were made to supplement wages. The results were immediate and disastrous. Pauperism became endemic among

VOL. 245. NO. 499.

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the agricultural population; rates rose with appalling rapidity; much land went out of cultivation altogether. Worst of all, whole districts, especially south of the Trent, became hopelessly demoralized it did not pay a man to be industrious or a womar. to remain chaste. Outdoor relief was given in a variety of forms: by providing gratuitous house-room; by parish employment; by money relief" in lieu of labour "; by the "roundsman system "; by the "labour-rates system "; and, most commonly of all, by "make-up" or "bread-money "-an allowance to supplement wages. Lax administration was, as frequently happens, more responsible even than panic legislation for the demoralization which ensued. Writing of the old Poor Law, Mr. F. C. Montague an exceptionally clear-headed commentator—says :

It guaranteed to every labourer not merely his life, but a living more plentiful than he could obtain upon the open market. It undertook that his means should increase with the increase of his family and it acknowledged the duty of saving him from suffering, irrespective of his own merits or demerits. It gave practically to everybody who asked. It charged not only the weak upon the strong, but the stupid on the skilful, the lazy upon the industrious, the drunken upon the sober, the dissolute upon the chaste, the honest upon the dishonest.*

This terrible impeachment can be proved up to the hilt from the Report of the Royal Commission of 1834. The Commissioners showed that economic dislocation and social degradation had gone hand in hand to produce a state of things which could only be described as appalling. Rural life was reduced to chaos : country banks stopped payment by the score; mortgages were foreclosed; credit collapsed; farmers, who in the war had competed eagerly for farms, were handing in notices to quit; farms remained unlet ; many substantial farmers were forced "on to the parish." Worst of all, perhaps, was the incalculable wrong inflicted upon farmers and labourers who struggled to remain self-supporting and independent; the debasement of the others was matched only by their discontent.

The Report of the Commissioners was followed by prompt legislation, and legislation was followed by sound administration, consistently maintained throughout a considerable period. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was based upon the principle laid down by the Commissioners that "the situation of the person

*" The Old Poor Law and the New Socialism," p. 11.

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