562 THE POOR LAW AMENDMENT BILL. 



the peculiar style of the noble Chancellor of the Exchequer 

 upon the occasion of announcing the bill which he intended to 

 bring in upon the subject, as compared with the bill which he 

 afterwards actually did introduce ; never were any two things more 

 distinct ! 



But to return to the commissioners ; for they, ill-informed and 

 unprepared as they avowedly were, are the real agents in this extra- 

 ordinary piece of legislation. After edifying his majesty with some 

 half dozen pages, describing the " progress of the law" upon the 

 subject of the relief of the poor, they make the following concluding 

 remark, which in our opinion is the only one of their suggestions that 

 is worth a single farthing, and comprehends, when we come to reflect 

 upon it, the whole gist of the question : 



" It is now our painful duty to report, that in the greater part of the 

 districts which we have been able to examine, the fund which the 4,3d of 

 Elizabeth directed to be employed in setting to work children and persons capable 

 oflqbour, but using no daily trade, and in the necessary relief of the impotent, 

 is applied to purposes opposed to the letter, and still more to the spirit of that law, 

 and DESTRUCTIVE to the morals of the most numerous class, and to the welfare 

 of all." 



This little observation is modestly printed, undistinguished by 

 italics or capitals, at the fag end of page 13, yet it is worthy of being 

 printed in letters of gold, as compared with the extraordinary " RE- 

 COMMENDATIONS" which are pompously put forth in capitals at the 

 end of the volume. The grievances complained of under the existing 

 system of the poor laws are all to be traced with certainty and ease to 

 a comparatively recent period ; and they are all found to originate in 

 the abuse of the principle established by, and very nearly of two 

 centuries successfully pursued under, the Act 43 Eliz. Let us in- 

 quire what that principle was, as we find it in the words of the act 

 itself, which declares that certain persons in every parish shall be an- 

 nually appointed overseers of the poor, whose business it should be to 

 " take order from time to time, by and with the consent of two or more 

 justices of the peace, for setting to work the children of all such whose 

 parents shall not be thought able to keep and maintain their children ; 

 and also for setting to work all such persons, married or unmarried, 

 having no means to maintain them, and no ordinary and daily trade 

 of life to get their living by ; and also raise weekly (by taxation of 

 every inhabitant, &c.) a convenient stock of flax, hemp, wool, thread, 

 iron, and other ware and stuff, to set the poor on work ; and also 

 competent sums of money for and towards the necessary relief of the 

 lame, impotent, old, blind, and such other among them being poor 

 and not able to work ; and also for putting out children to be ap- 

 pre,ntices," &c. 



This admirable statute will be found on examination to comprise 

 every possible direction which the utmost feelings of human kindness 

 could suggest to alleviate the sufferings of the distressed, tempered 

 with all the sage precautions which can alone render the benefits of 

 such charity permanent and just. It took into consideration every 

 possible shape and circumstance under which the necessitous, whether 



