57 



which occasioned a great sacrifice of farming 

 capital, and unprecedented distress amongst the 

 agricultural population. Thousands of labourers 

 were thrown out of employment, and were driven 

 to the hateful necessity (for hitherto a spirit of 

 honest independence animated the breast of the 

 British peasantry) of applying for parochial relief 

 to support themselves and their families from star- 

 vation ; and for relief, too, which they knew was 

 reluctantly and grudgingly supplied supplied 

 from constraint, and not from the sympathies of 

 charity. Thus reduced, not by their own miscon- 

 duct, " to eat the bitter bread of poverty;" thus 

 fallen from circumstances of steady industry reap- 

 ing its just reward, to a condition of ill-paid and 

 precarious occupation ; is it to be wondered at 

 when we consider their low moral condition, that 

 the numbers of half employed labourers are be- 

 come indolent, dissatisfied, disorderly and reckless, 

 and that their habits should have a pernicious in- 

 fluence upon the whole class. The small degree 

 of improvement which took place in the state of 

 agriculture after 1823, enabled the farmer to em- 

 ploy more labourers and to give them better 

 wages ; in addition to this, he began to find out, 

 that if he did not employ them, he must support 

 them, and that they were become so dissatisfied 

 with their condition that he feared to do otherwise 

 lest his property should be sacrificed. These are 

 some of the causes which have occasioned the im- 

 proved state of the agricultural poor. But with 



