BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF THE LATE REV. DR CHALMERS. 505 



laws he utterly condemned. He had termed the system a " legalised enormity." 

 He had ascribed to the action of those laws in England all the evils under which 

 the country suffered from pauperism. He considered them to he the bane of 

 Christian charity, and the curse of all connected with them. It remained, then, 

 to test by experience, when he had a proper field, an oppngite system ; and this he 

 was determined to do in Glasgow. When, in the year 1815, he took charge of the 

 Tron Church Parish in Glasgow, the system of management for the poor through- 

 out the city was somewhat peculiar. The whole funds raised for the poor, whether 

 in the shape of assessments or collections at the church-doors, were under the 

 administration of two bodies, one called the General Session, consisting of the 

 elders and clergy of all the parishes, and the other called the Town- Hospital, which 

 had pensioners within its walls, and owif-pensioners residing in the city. The 

 whole expense of poor support had been on the increase. In 1803 it amounted 

 to about £4000; in 1818, to about £11,000; in 1820, to £13,000. His determination 

 was, from the first, to manage his district without assessment. In this wild and 

 extravagant scheme, as it was considered, he was opposed by the General Session, 

 by the Magistrates, by the Town-Hospital, and by the Presbytery. Indeed, the 

 Presbjrtery had carried up a case against him to the General Assembly ; accord- 

 ingly, he was glad to be transferred to St John's Parish, which took place in 1819, 

 and where the same obstacles and impediments to his experiment did not exist. 

 The population was 10,000; the people, with very few exceptions, of the poorest 

 class of manufacturers. According to the due proportion of population and pau- 

 perism, the expenditure for St John's had been about one-tenth of the expendi- 

 ture for all Glasgow, or upwards of £1400 annually. His first step was to release 

 the General Session and the Town-Hospital from all obligation to support the 

 St John's poor, and he undertook, with his own church-door collection, to meet 

 their wants. This collection averaged £400 a-year. With £400 a-year, there- 

 fore, he began the work. Now, of this sum, £225 were already pledged for 

 regular cases permanently settled upon parochial relief, so that, from this col- 

 lection fund of £400, £175 only remained as a surplus to meet and to provide for 

 new cases of pauperism. But, besides the £400 — the result of day collections at 

 the church-door— there was another and an evening collection made by a very 

 poor congi-egation, chiefly in halfpence, which amounted to about £80 a-year. Out 

 of this £80 he resolved to provide for new cases of paupers coming upon the 

 parish, and to leave the £400 collection to take care of the old paupers. He had 

 previously made a minute district subdivision of the parish, and secured the as- 

 sistance of zealous and intelligent deacons as visitors, one for each district. What, 

 then, was the result of the system, and the degree of success with which it was 

 accompanied ? The £80 covered the whole expense of the new pauperism, which 

 did not require more than £66, 6s. The £400 were, in the mean time, increasing 

 in the hands of the kirk-session by old paupers dropping off, and by the surplus 



VOL. XVI. PART V. 6 



