THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. g 



were found were made in some measure responsible for them (so, re- 

 introducing in a more general form the feudal arrangement of attach- 

 ment to the soil, and reciprocal claim on the soil) it was not suspected 

 that the foundations were laid for a system which would, in after-times, 

 bring about a demoralization threatening general ruin. When, in 

 subsequent centuries, to meet the evils of again-increasing vagrancy 

 which punishment failed to repress, these measures, reenacted with 

 modifications, ended in making the people of each parish chargeable 

 with the maintenance of their poor, while it reestablished the severest 

 penalties on vagabondage, even to death without benefit of clergy,, no 

 one ever anticipated that, while the penal elements of this legislation 

 would by-and-by become so mollified as to have little practical effect 

 in checking idleness, the accompanying arrangements would eventually 

 take such forms as immensely to encourage idleness. Neither legisla- 

 tors nor others foresaw that in 230 years the poor's-rate, having grown 

 to seven millions, would become a public spoil of which we read that 



" The ignorant believed it an inexhaustible fund which belonged to them. 

 To obtain their share the brutal bullied the administrators, the profligate ex- 

 hibited their bastards which must be fed, the idle folded their arms and waited 

 till they got it ; ignorant boys and girls married upon it ; poachers, thieves, and 

 prostitutes, extorted it by intimidation ; country justices lavished it for popular- 

 ity, and guardians for convenience. . . . Better men sank down among the 

 worse ; the rate-paying cottager, after a vain struggle, went to the pay-table to 

 seek relief; the modest girl might starve while her bolder neighbor received 

 Is. M. per week for every illegitimate child." 



As sequences of the law of Elizabeth, no one imagined that, in rural 

 districts, farmers, becoming chief administrators, would pay part of 

 their men's wages out of the rates (so taxing the rest of the rate- 

 payers for the cultivation of their fields) ; and that this abnormal 

 relation of master and man would entail bad cultivation. No one 

 imagined that, to escape poor's-rates, landlords would avoid building 

 cottages, and would even clear cottages away ; so causing overcrowd- 

 ing, with consequent evils, bodily and mental. No one imagined that 

 workhouses, so called, would become places for idling in ; and places 

 where married couples, habitually residing, displayed their " elective 

 affinities" time after time. 1 Yet these, and detrimental results which 

 it would take pages to enumerate, culminating in that general result 

 most detrimental of all helping the worthless to multiply at the ex- 

 pense of the worthy finally came out of these measures taken ages 

 ago merely to mitigate certain immediate evils. 



Is it not obvious, then, that only in the course of those long periods 



i In one case, " out of thirty married couples, there was not one man then living 

 with his own wife, and some of them had exchanged wives two or three times since their 

 entrance." This, along with various kindred illustrations, will be found in tracts on the 

 Poor-Law, by a late uncle of mine, the Rev. Thomas Spencer, of Hinton Charterhouse, 

 who was chairman of the Bath Union during its first six years. 



