5o6 History of the English Landed Interest. 



open to question whetlier as a remedy for one form of disease 

 it did not create another. Its effects on the ratepayer as a 

 ratepayer were wholly beneficial, but its effects on the rate- 

 payer as a landlord or a farmer were disastrous. It was an 

 interference with seignorial rights which not even the canons 

 of advanced political economy would have sanctioned. Up to 

 the enactment of the Poor Law Amendment Measure, the 

 landlords and farmers had supplied and managed the funds 

 for pauper relief. Henceforth they were made still to suppl}^ 

 the funds which State-appointed officers dispensed. For all 

 this, it would be we think erroneous to term such inter- 

 ference uncalled-for, because, as we have pointed out more 

 than once, the administration of relief had been wretchedly 

 transacted. McCulloch, however, takes an extreme view in 

 his Treatise on Political Economy^ and demonstrates how it 

 was considered by Adam Smith the highest impertinence in 

 kings and ministers to pretend to instruct private people how 

 they may best employ their capital and industry — a preten- 

 sion, he maintains, which was surpassed when the authors and 

 abettors of the new Poor Law deprived the ratepayers of all 

 control over their own affairs. Its primary object, however, 

 was to benefit the labourer, and Rogers has described its 

 action upon him as wholesome surgery and " the sharpest 

 trial he had to bear." 



The committee which sat in 1817 had opened the country's 

 eyes to the mischief perpetrated by Pitt's Act of 1795, by 

 sho^dng that the cause which had been demoralising the 

 labourers and ruining the ratepayer, was the indiscriminate 

 bestowal of out-door relief initiated by the Speenhamland 

 incident and legalised by Parliament. Had then the Act of 

 "William IV. simply repealed that of Pitt the same results 

 would have been obtained without that strained relationship 

 between employer and labourer which the Act of 183-1 left 

 behind. But it not only abolished the extravagant innova- 

 tions of the former measure, it was intended to give the 

 death-blow to every description of outdoor relief, and though 

 subsequently it was found impracticable to carry this out to 

 the letter, it so far effected its purpose, that it created in the 



