3i6 History of the English Landed hiterest. 



been profitably employed outside the workhouse walls. This 

 reduced the processes by which the practice of outdoor relief 

 could be widened, to a minimum, and left the authorities little 

 or no choice beyond those mischievous methods which they 

 eventually adopted. Everybody recognised that something 

 was radically wrong in the system of poor relief, but no one 

 was able to point out an effectual remedy. The highest aim 

 of the economist, at this or any period, cannot be better ex- 

 pressed than in the Avords of Mandeville. " The poor," he 

 says, " have nothing to stir them up to labour but their wants, 

 which it is wisdom to relieve, but folly to cure." It seems, 

 however, to have been the aim of the philanthropist to cure 

 rather than relieve, and of the ratepayer, to do neither the one 

 nor the other. Between the conflicting efforts of these two, 

 the poor were either pampered or neglected ; more often, how- 

 ever, the latter, because the local authorities in whose hands 

 rested the chief power, were entirely interested in keeping 

 rates low. Hewlett describes the means used in his own 

 parish of Dunmow as twofold. First, the authorities spared 

 their funds to the utmost ; and secondly, they admitted as few 

 paupers into the house as possible. In other words, the rate 

 was kept low by starving the applicants for relief. 



We cannot altogether blame the parish officials when we 

 bear in mind how rapidly the National Taxation was increas- 

 ing. The country in the space of one century had augmented 

 its net revenue from about two millions sterling to nearly 

 fourteen and a half. By the period at which Davies was 

 writing, the total taxation was not far short of eighteen 

 millions, and though it had been kept as far as possible clear 

 of the necessaries of life, yet Adam Smith's view had been by 

 now unanimously admitted as correct, viz., that a tax imposed 

 on any one article of general consumption raises the price, not 

 only of the article taxed, but of all other articles also. 



As a natural consequence the poor rate had increased in like 

 proportions. It may be assumed that in 1572 it was not over 

 £200,000; but a hundred years later it had risen to thrice 

 that sum. During the last fifty years of the eighteenth 

 century it more than doubled itself, for in 1753 it was just 



