The Emancipation of Labour. 505 



labour voluntarily ceded their ancient rights, and as soon as 

 Hume's committee in 1824 had reported the results of the 

 evidence laid before it to the House, and the eleven clauses of 

 the Bill could be drafted, the measure was brought forward 

 and passed without debate or opposition. 



But some far more drastic remedy was essentially necessary 

 in the case of the Poor Laws than that abolition of a few 

 statutes which had been thus effectual in the Labour question. 

 The working man as a working man had been freed, but the 

 working man in his new guise of pauper still required eman- 

 cipation. Nothing in the legislation already mentioned had 

 prevented the spread of pauperism. Thus we find that the 

 poor-rates which had increased from £600,000 at the beginning 

 of the eighteenth century to £3,000,000 towards its end, rose 

 in 1801 to £4,077,871, to £6,656,106 in 1812, to £7,870,801 in 



1817, and then dropped slowly to £6,317,255 in 1834. This 

 was out of all proportion to the increase in population ; for 

 at the accession of George I. in 1714 the poor rates averaged 

 3.'^. ?>\d. per head on the population of 5,750,000, while in 

 1834 they averaged 8,s. ^\d. per head on the population of 

 14,372,000. It is possible that either East's^ Act of 1815, 

 or Sturgess Bourne's Act" of 1819, or both combined, may 

 have assisted (though probably the restored peace had more 

 to do with it) in helping forward the small but decided de- 

 crease in the rate which, as we have just shown, set in about 



1818. But this was not to be compared with the marked 

 effects of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which suc- 

 ceeded at the end of three years in reducing the expenditure 

 to one-third of what it had been at the date w^hen the Act 

 came into force. 



This statute was of a radical and drastic nature — more 

 so, even, than the circumstances of the times required. It is 



1 55 Geo. III. c. 137. 



" 59 Geo. 111. c. 12. These Acts merely- confirmed the practice of the 

 Speenhamlaud .justices. The first empowered the magistrates to order 

 relief for any length of time they thought lit ; and the second, though it 

 favoured the workhouse principle, allowed pauper labourers the same 

 remedies for the recovery of their wages as those enjoyed by legitimate 

 workpeople. 



