The Emancipation of Labour. 497 



the qn<^stioii which occupied the thoughts of statesmen, econo- 

 mists, landlords, farmers, and the poor themselves, and it is one 

 that has never been satisfactorily answered up to the present 

 day. Certainly at the end of the eighteenth century the 

 effects of the legislation enacted prove how frequently we then 

 failed to solve this difficulty. 



The best way of benefiting a poor man is not to make things 

 too easy for him in his poverty, but to lead or drive him oiit of 

 it. The tendency of the Poor Laws was to reverse this process, 

 so that the man who was willing to help himself was impeded, 

 while the man who had become pauperized was encouraged to 

 remain so.^ " The poor-rates," said one Stanley, a Cheshire 

 magistrate, " will in a short time alter the whole character of 

 the English nation. They promote an enmity between the 

 land occupiers and the poor, which makes every township a 

 scene of warfare." Besides this form of internecine strife, we 

 learn from another writer of the time that the most expensive 

 litigation was common between parish and parish over the 

 settlement question, so that the amount of trouble and money, 

 necessary to transport one pauper a few miles, often consider- 

 ably augmented the entire district's rate. 



The most peacefully disposed ratepayers could not bear with 

 equanimity such practices as, for example, the following :— A 

 rich landlord could, if he liked, depopulate his own parish of 

 labour, and hire what he required from a distance at quarter 

 sessions rates, which would have to be supplemented out of the 

 parochial poor funds where the stranger workman happened to 

 reside. In this way the parish which employed the labour 

 did not contribute to its entire support. 



The writer to the Board on Berkshire agriculture points out 

 that, according to Adam Smith, " the fund which originally 

 supplies a nation with all the necessaries and conveniences of 

 life is labour, and that consequently on the establishment of 

 social and civil order, the triple union of land, stock, and labour 

 formed the basis of every valuable possession." 



* Middleton asserted that the workhouse food was greatly superior to 

 what the labourer was accustomed to at home. Rees' Cyclo.^ sub voc. 

 « Poor." 



n. E E 



