17 
amount of poverty under any other heading was relatively small. 
The treatment of poverty had shown historically the same 
confusion between symptom and disease as appeared in earlier 
times in medicine, and illustrated the mischief and hindrance to 
real progress caused by the adoption of an empirical treatment of 
symptoms instead of a scientific treatment of disease. The 1601 
Act directed against vagrancy declared wisely that no one able to 
work should receive relief without the exaction of labour. The 
settlement laws stopped the migration of workers from place to 
place, and in later reigns led to relief being given to multitudes 
of able-bodied poor without the exaction of labour. As a 
protest against the intolerable consequences of this inconsiderate 
benevolence, parish workhouses were provided where a residential 
labour test was enforced as a condition of relief, but in 1722 an 
Act was passed which prohibited Guardians from insisting on the 
able-bodied entering the workhouse, and threw on them “the 
duty of finding work near their homes for such applicants as 
profess to be able and willing to work, but are unable to find 
employment, and of making up any supposed deficiency out of 
the poor rates.” 
By the operation of this Act the reduction of pauperism 
which had been secured was converted into a rapid and alarming 
increase ; an unofficial condition of misery was created and an 
impetus given to idleness and vice which resulted, by the Act of 
1815, in the removal of the time limit for ordering relief and 
converted charitable help into an ordinary grant in aid of 
insufficient wages, and hence the wage standard fell. The 
commission of enquiry in 1832 found that in many places 
subsistence from poor rates was more easily obtained than by 
labour (Eastbourne poor rate was 13s. in the pound) ; that under 
such influences prudence and thrift were discarded ; sobriety and 
temperance were left without encouragement, and that the whole 
nation was becoming demoralised and impoverished. The Act 
of 1834, by reviving the test of admission for able-bodied paupers, 
at once rendered wages absolutely separate from charity, raised 
the status of the wage-earning classes, diminished the number of 
improvident marriages, and caused a rapid decline of pauperism. 
Dr. Newsholme thought that at the present time there was 
evidence of reaction, and exemplified it by commenting on the 
fact that inadequate out-door relief was being given in an 
increasing proportion of cases and was officially encouraged. 
Applying the principles of evolution to the cure of poverty, it 
must be conceded that the community, in the husbandry of its 
strictly limited energy, cannot afford to allow available energy to 
be wasted, whilst wisdom and the rules of right conduct equally 
direct that it should not adopt towards the poor (a class dissipating 
more than it possessed and earned) the attitude of extermination 
proper to a pre-social age. It has to turn them to account with 
