3o6 History of the English Landed Interest. 



The magistrates in quarter sessions were sole arbiters of the 

 prices of industrial remuneration. Being the chief emplo^^ers 

 of rural labour, it was their interest to reduce wages to a 

 minimum. For though in so doing they increased the num- 

 bers of destitute poor, and thereby the poor rate, yet the con- 

 tribution, which as occupiers of land they were compelled to 

 pay for pauper relief, was small in comparison with the large 

 benefits they derived from cheap labour. In the towns, how- 

 ever, the occupiers of houses and lands who did not employ 

 labour were grievously handicapped by this heavy impost. 

 Consequently throughout the seventeenth century wages were 

 low and prices high. " I can conceive," says Thorold Rogers, 

 " nothing more cruel — I had almost said more insolent — than 

 to condemn a labourer to the lowest possible wages on which 

 life may be sustained by an Act of Parliament, interpreted and 

 enforced by an ubiquitous body of magistrates, whose interest 

 it was to screw the pittance down to the lowest conceivable 

 margin, and to inform the stinted recipient that when he had 

 starved on that during the days of his strength, others must 

 work to maintain him in sickness or old age." ^ 



It is, therefore, no surprise to find that numerous schemes 

 for reforming the entire machinery of the poor laws were in 

 existence. In the severity of their provisions against theft 

 and mendicancy they were in excess of anything in force 

 abroad, yet thieves and beggars were far more common in 

 this country than on the Continent. It was not that there 

 was anything really objectionable in the provisions of the great 

 English poor law known as 43 Eliz. c. 2, but its execution 

 was defective and capable of being abused. The kingdom 

 had been so minutely sub-divided for purposes of poor-law 

 administration that instances were frequent where all the 

 parochial funds were wholly inadequate to cope with the 

 prevailing distress. As a consequence of such infinitesimal 

 division, the chief authority was relegated to the hands of 

 petty officials, who abused their powers by favouritism and 

 time-serving. 



The union system had been introduced by 9 Geo. I. c. 7, but 

 ' Six Centuries' Work and Wages. T. Kogers, p. 425. 



