84 Freedom and Progress 



A strange type of character must have been produced when 

 a strong man of twenty-five could not get more than a shilling 

 a day, while idle men with a large family to get the head-rate 

 received four times as much. It was a healthy piece of legislation 

 which repealed the old law and threw the whole responsibility 

 for the wages of the labourers on the employers. The bad old 

 customs did leave their impression, and if any peculiar deficiency 

 shows itself in the labourers to-day, it may be traced largely to 

 this strange experiment in economics. 



But the labourers suffered not only in wages. The Poor Law 

 and the Law of Settlement together made it the apparent 

 interest of the landowner and put it in his power to hustle the 

 labourers from his own parish to another. Hundreds of cottages 

 were pulled down so that there might be no inhabitants to claim 

 relief from the rates, and in many parishes the deficiency has 

 never been repaired. Labourers had to be drawn from long 

 distances to do the work on farms. The gang-system arose from 

 this, under which men, women, and children went round under 

 a gang-master, having to walk many miles to and from work, or 

 sleep in barns and other outhouses. 



A quotation from the report of Mr. S. C. Denison, one of the 

 assistant Poor Law Commissioners in 1843, gives some idea of 

 conditions. He reported on Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincoln. 

 ' I believe ', he says, ' those who first (unintentionally and 

 unknowingly) caused the mischief can alone cure it : I mean the 

 neighbouring landowners. If those 103 stranger families, who 

 now swell the amount of crime and misery at Castle Acre, were 

 living in their own parishes, subject to the control of their land- 

 lords . . . Castle Acre would not be reproached as " the coop of 

 all the scrapings in the country ": its own native population 

 would be uncontaminated by the refuse of other parishes : the 

 gang-system would necessarily cease ; and Castle Acre would 

 no longer be, what it now is, the most miserable rural parish 



