THE POOR-LAWS: SETTLEMENT.
" Quand II est question d'eatimer la puissance publicus., le bel esprit visite le palate do prince, sea ports, Fes troupes, ses arsenaux, sea vines; in vial politique parcourt lea terres et va dans la cbaumiere du labonreur ; le premier volt ce qu'on a fait, lc second ce at ton pent faire."—RoasstAu.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.
Sia—In England we are a practical people, and we are proud of being so. To argue things, therefore, from first principles, is generally thought pedantic and un- necessary. We usually come right, as the common phrase goes, in the end; but it is not until we have learnt by experience the evils of inconsiderate legislation. Instead of probing the maladies of which we complain to their source, we apply superficial and uncertain remedies, which are only useful in as far as they tend to open up the real causes of social grievance. This is partly accounted for, because in a free government all things are matter of compromise: principles are never carried out fully, and vested interests always obtain enough political power to enable them to bargain for important reservations in their own behalf. Strong 'minorities, be it for good or for evil, have a powerful veto upon any measure of
reform.
These remarks are not more applicable to our Poor-laws than to other great ques- tions. Thus, we may observe that the last great monopoly which we have abolished —namely, that of supplying the people with food—ought to have been the very first, and not the last to be swept away by a manufacturing country, whose chief in- terest it was and is to supply its labourers with a cheap and abundant supply :ef the necessaries of life. As far as the interests of agriculture (I speak a I a farmer) were concerned, it would have been obviously better to begin by lowering the duties upon grain, and continuing a protection upon fattened live stock; of which, being a quasi manufactured product, and containing in its manure the means of fertilizing the soil, it was desirable to encourage the production by an artificial stimulus. Yet this order of proceeding has been inverted. So in Ireland : we first give the people the most extensive franchise, the forty-shilling freehold; we then confer upon them a qualified civil and religious liberty, in the shape of Roman Catholic emancipation; lastly, we bethink ourselves of educating thew. How different would the state of that country have been, could we have educated the people, even as they arc now educated, five-and-forty years ago, and then have given them emancipation. By this time, when the work is all to begin, they would have been prepared for extensive franchises. The same story is to be told regarding the West Indies: could we have abolished slavery at the time we began our insane crusade against the slave-trade—merely regulating by cer- tain sanatory precautions the transit of the Negro acres the Atlantic—the pro- bability is that our Colonies might ere this have defied the world. But I will not trouble you with further examples, foreign to the matter in hand: I have quoted those which appeared to me useful to cite as an excuse for carrying you back once more to thefirat principles of our early statutes in relation to the poor. The right of the poor man to relief and to subsistence is peculiar and inalien- able: it rests upon a faithful belief, which all men entertain, of the power of the Creator to provide for the wants of his creatures. Thus, when that profound thinker Dr. Malthus, in his ingenious book, asserted that Nature had placed no cover at her banquet for those who were unable to provide a sufficient supply of subsistence for their own use, he was met by a shout of derision, and ultimately obliged, as you stated, to expunge the passage from his work. Men felt that he built upon an hypothesis which never had occurred, and never need occur; and that penury had always (as far as experience goes) arisen, either directly or indi- rectly, from the mistakes or ignorance or indolence of man, but not from the ex- haustion or failure of Nature a resources. Were a prince and a peasant to be shipwrecked together upon a lonely island, their common manhood would entitle each to share the subsistence which its soil afforded. The right of the poor is analogous to this. The artificial distinctions of society—the privileges of pro- perty—the blessings of law—lose much of their advantage when they lead us to forget that we arc all originally equal. The right of the poor man to relief is a practpractical and complete acknowledgment of the brotherhood of all mankind. ical a man, says Edmund Burke, " can claim nothing, according to the rules of commerce and the principles of justice, he passes out of that department and comes within the jurisdiction of mercy ; and the same author adds, in like spiri " Without all doubt, charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty on all Christians, next in order after the payment of debts—full as strong, and by nature made infinitely more agreeable to us." No state can with impunity resist this claim; a claim never cancelled by any misconduct on the part of the poor them- selves, because the duty it entails carseever be perfectly " Ye have the poor ALWAYS with you." The question naturally occurs, bow are we to define the poor? Our neighbours may be, probably are, the poor: thus the query in point of fact nearly comes to the Scripture one, who is my neighbour? and the answer doubtless ought to be of the same extensive character, as the parable infers. The notions of our ances- tors, however, attached to neighbourhood the common sense and vulgar interpre- tation of " location near a person "; and in the olden time such a definition answered admirably for all practical purposes. We find, indeed, that the old statutes for the relief of the poor prior to the Revolution are almost always immediately followed by others for the regulation of wages; and in still earlier days prior to the Reformation, by laws sta'iog the terms upon which a serf might be re- quired to serve his lord. The idea obviously was that the right to charity could only be earned by consenting to the terms of 'the covenant between the em- ployer and the employed, on the same principle as a master is compelled to keep his slave well. This is not, strictly speaking, charity. So early, however, as the year 1388. we find in the Vagrant-laws (the invariable companions, alas! of poor-laws) the notion of location recognized: impotent beggers are directed to repair to the place of their birth to be maintained there. In 1494, beggars and others not able to work were directed to repair to the place where they dwelt or were best known, " in order to be supported " ; • two kinds of settlement, whence all others truly spring, having been all along recognized—that by birth, and that by inhabitancy. The 13th and 14th of Charles the Second are the true foundation of our present laws of settlement; enacted, as is stated in the preamble to the act, because the poor have not reaped or cannot reap the benefits of the act made in the 43d of Elizabeth. With the complexities and injustice of these statutes I shall not trouble you at length: suffice it to repeat Adam Smith's short and pithy con- demnation of them—" that no labouring man attains the age of forty years without experiencing their injustice and hardship." Little indeed did those guess, who thought they were legislating for the poor man, the grievous injustice of what they were about by compromising the freedom of his industry. There are now seven or eight modes of obtaining a settlement,' some of them of a most complicated and difficult character to prove; there are as many as 14,500 parishes or townships in which a poor man may be settled; and there are not lever than nearly a million and a half of paupers in England and Wales who receive charity from the public. To each of these the first question is, shall he be relieved ?—the next, shall he be relieved in that locality where he has been living, carrying on a peaceful and happy industry—where his children have been boor; or shall he be removed to some distant and unknown spot, where all these ties cease to exist? What a mass of misery to the poor, of litigation and expense to time public, do these few simple facts open up I To this complication of evil the present House of Commons has (with the best intentions certainly) added the novel status of "irremoveability." It seems admitted on all hands, that this measure has had no object beyond " keeping the sore open." Indeed, I fear that, even in the present winter, the late enactment will cause much hardship to the poor. Many unions, which under some late and very judicious regulations of the Poor- law Commissioners had entered into voluntary arrangements for the relief of the non-resident poor, have suspended their arrangements; many more will be compelled, from self-defence, to act upon a similar principle. But it is to the rate-payer and the public as well as to the poor man that the law of settlement is essentially unjust. Upon what principle of justice can it be maintained that the rates of a poor district, such as Bethnal Green' should ex- ceed those of St. George's, Hanover Square, or of Belgrsve Square? Why should the small squire, surrounded by gentlemen farmers not so rich as himself, pays heavier poor-rate than the wealthy lord of an adjoining parish, who, being pos- sessed of every acre within it, can shift the burden from his own shoulders by a thousand contrivances, to which it is unnecessary to allude? Are these things just? Is it not obvious that the true principle of public charity is, that all should contribute according to their means ! The laws of settlement invert-this order of things, the poorest localities being those which are most heavily taxed. Adam Smith and litCulloch bow to the authority of Sir Josiah Child, as the father of political economy—the first advocate of free trade. What says Sir Jo. siah Child of these settlement-laws? In a treatise written so far back as 166e, he conceives that the sad and wretched condition of the poor' of which, he says, there can be no doubt, is owing to a radical error in the laws, in leaving it to the care of every parish to maintain their own poor only; the consequence of which is' the shifting off, sending, or whipping back, the poor wanderers to the place of their birth or last abode.
After the lapse of nearly two centuries, it will be found, I believe, that this acute thinker was quite in the right. The reform of the law of settlement must be prior to the consideration of the Poor-laws. A poor-law, the best in the world, cannot swim with such a dead weight. It is an incubus that presses upon all our efforts to be benevolent. It directly classes the poor man who seeks his livelihood abroad with the vagrant; and to you, Sir, who have so well and so logically drawn the line between poverty and pauperism, I need not go farther to demonstrate its crying injustice. Of the evils of our settlement-laws, it appears to me that union settlement would be some mitigation—it would be no cure. Probably it will be carried into effect. There are only between six and seven hundred unions: it will therefore simplify matters. It needs, indeed, no logical skill to point out that exactly the same class of evils attend union settlement which attend parish settlement; it must be owned, however, in a minor degree.
Union settlement has peculiar evils of another kind. It disturbs all the rela- tions of that little polity the parish, and breaks up many bonds of sympathy grateful to the poor. The country has no affection tbr these poor-law districts: a large house full of windows, a green baize table, a board of red-faced farmers, with a man of business in the chair, claim none of our old and time-honoured affections. Union settlement would estrange the gentry from the poor; it would give each landed proprietor a less immediate interest in the welfare of his neigh- bours. Railways and cheap manufactures have changed the character of the squirearchy. How few now reside all the year upon their estates ! The tendency of union settlement, and indeed of every measure of centralization, will be to draw them more and more into the towns, and make them think of their estates merely with regard to profit and loss. This is an evil greatly to be apprehended.
If then union settlement be only a mitigation of the evil, and have other evils of a different kind attendant specially upon it—if, too, it be the only remedy sug- gested (and I am aware of no other)—the question arises, can we cut the Gor dian knot and do away with the settlement-laws altogether? In the last session of Parliament, I was astonished to perceive how strong the current of public opinion had begun to set in this direction. Petitions for the re- peal of the law of settlement were presented, not only from separate and insigni- ficant Boards of Guardians, but also from Hull, Liverpool, and other great towns. It may fairly be presumed that those who signed these petitions had not in all cases contemplated the vast and necessary consequences of such a change. .1 confess myself adverse to so sweeping an innovation. But, Sir, your patience must be exhausted; and, with the hope that I may once or twice more be allowed to trespass upon it again, I shall take my leave of • Two kinds of birth settlement, (that of bastards and that of legitimate Mare%) marriage, apprenticeship, hiring, servitude, rating, and also 'serving In a parish-Mee.
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