CIR aletrOVIIIM A public meeting, very numerously attended, leas held
on Tuesday evening, at the Chapel, Chapel Court, Southwark, for the purpose of " memorializing the Secretary of State respecting the enormous powers of the Poor. LawCommissioners," and petitioning " for such altera. tions in the Poor-law as might he considered necessary by the meeting." Four resolutions were adopted by the meeting,—to the effect, that the Poor-law is a violation of the laws of God and man, tyrannical, intole. ruble, unchristian, cruel, and calculated to "grind the • poor to the earth ;" that a memmial founded on the resolutions should be drawn tip by a Committee, and being signed by the rate-payers, should he pre- sented to Lord John Russell; and that the Guardians of the Poor in the parish of St. George the Martyr had deserved the thanks of the meeting for their spirited resistance to "the tyranny and inhumanity of the Poor-law Commissioners."
Mr. Harvey was in the chair. Mr. Humphrey sent an apology for his absence ; caused, he said, by a previous engagement. This commu- nication was received with groans and hisses. Mr. Harvey twice ad- dressed the meeting in a strain that highly delighted the assembly, and accorded entirely with the spirit of the resolutions. He said— The working of the bill illustrated the entire policy of the Govetoment. The Poor- law Commissioners must have torn their hearts from their breasts before they could have promulgated the horrid decree that infirmity was a crime, and should be treated as such—before they declared the house of sorrow was a gaol, and the fit companions of dejected innocence were to be found in convicted culprits. With them age inspired no veneration, infancy no love, virtue no respect. Cold and heartless calculators, they see no humanity but in economy— no sympathy but in shillings saved. Who empowered these creatures of the law to set at nought the benignant laws of the Creator? But let not himself or this meeting be misunderstood. We were not the advocates of criminal idleness— fastening the young and healthy and powerful upon the industry of the working classes. No man in the meridian of his days. and unaffected by disease, ought to be allowed to live upon the toil of his neighbour. We say here, as in the House of Commons, that there ought to be neither parish paupers nor peer paupers : laziness and luxury are equally odious, when sustained by the industry of a virtuous community ; both ought to be denounced, execrated, and despised. Here it was that we traced the odious working of the partial system of Govern- ment. Pi opose to revise the Pen•ion list, crowded as it is with titled vice and degenerate nobility, panders to corruption and the basest pmsions ; and we have the Ministers ot a Reform Government interposing their perverted sym- pathies, and pleading for their relatives and friends, whom they have fastened upon the State, and whom they would be compelled to support but for this das tardly perversion of the People's treasures. But they do not hesitate to send forth their hired Commissioners to revise the house-list of a parish, who wring from the decrepit matron, tottering upon the threshold of her final home, even her paltry allowance of a shilling, and tell her she can no longer be allowed to receive it except as the inmate of a dungeon, breathing the polluted air of vice, derangement, and disease. Is this the humanity of a Reform Cabinet ? Is this the creed of the English Church ? Is this gross partiality to be endured in a Christian land? * * Shall an industrious artisan, who offers a frac- tured arm as the evidence of Ins willing labour, be hurried. regardless of his agonizing sufferings, of the entreaties of his wife, the teats of his children—
shall this Valuable citizen of a free country be torn from his comforts, to be tossed upon the straw and in the bed of a parish bastile, sort °under! by all that is odious to the eye of independence and shocking to the feelings of de- cency? Humanity appeals from the cell to Heaven, and says, such things shall not be. The helpless infant, the hoary head, the subject of passing accidents, must be difti:rently treated. Relief to then' must not be termed a deg radation- it is their right, and they must have it. Heaven and humanity have ratified their claim—law and justice must concede it. Death must not be approached through a dungeon—at least, not by the industrious poor. Shadows are too thickly scattered around their path to deny to them the solace of decent comforts
in their way to their final home. Here, at least, let us vindicate our claim to be Christians. * * '0 As things now are winked, a Poor-law Commis- sioner is regarded by the rate-payer as an intruder, and by the poor as a bar- barian—a concentrated iceberg, without heart, without .fteling, r•ithout humanity—a creature without Christianity, a tyrant without restraint, a despotic damn. He was the offspring of the proud, begotten out of selfishness.
[Mr. Harvey ought to be ashamed of uttering such balderdash as this, and of lending himself to such absurd misrepresentations. In- ' stead of an acute and well-informed advocate of popular rights, be seems to aim at the character of a declaiming demagogue. He will soon find successful competitors in his new trade, among persons far inferior to himself in talent.]
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