The Labour Question. 



zn 



a million and a half. During the year ending Easter, 1776, 

 £1,720,316 was raised in England and Wales by poor-rates, out 

 of which £1,556,804 Qs. ^d. was actually expended in relief. In 

 1785 this fund was exactly £2,004,238.1 



Though this was the period when the nation was engaged 

 in two expensive wars, we must not ascribe this vast and rapid 

 increase entirely to this circumstance. Between the termina- 

 tion of the American War and the outbreak of the struggle 

 with France there was an interval of peace, during which a 



' Kaimes, in his Sketches of the History of Man, puts the rate for the 

 entire kino-dom, in 1764, at £2,000,000 ; in 1773, at £3,000,000 ; and in 

 1776, at £5,000,000. Young, in his Farmer's Letters, quotes D'Anguill 

 as estimating it at £3,500,000, and Alcock as estimating it at £3,000,000. 

 But statistics of rating, prior to 1776, are mere guess-work. Davies quotes 

 from the returns made by the overseers under compulsion of an Act passed 

 in 1776, and gives the net amount paid to the poor according to the 

 medium average expenditure during three years. This is corroborated 

 by the following from the Gentleman'' s Magazine of 1777. 



Return of Poor Rates made to Parliament from Easter, 1775, 



TO Easter, 1776. 

 Money Raised. 



England 

 Wales 



£ s. 



1,679,585 



40,731 li 



£137,656 10 8 



Ten years later, viz., 1783-4-5, the average total expended upon the 

 poor was £2,004,239. The following year it had increased by close 

 on half a million. — Eden on the State of the Poor, Bk. II. ch. i. 



