and the Poor Law. 
97 
had been turned out of the club for cheating, he obtains only 
half, and that not in cash, but in flour. My specimen therefore 
considers himself an ill-used man, and as the stewards of the 
club stop his pay before he considers himself well, he thence- 
forward takes up his parable against self-help and benefit societies, 
and in the long run will have cost the ratepayers a little fortune 
in maintaining him and his family. When he comes per- 
manently into the house, he has the same care and attention as 
the most respectable poor man in it, who, indeed, occupies the 
next bed in the ward in which my specimen sleeps. 
Placed between the two classes of which these are the repre- 
sentative men, and influenced by the example of each for good 
and evil in turn, is the mass of the farm labourers of this country. 
Something surely might be done to encourage the good and 
repress the evil, not by destroying the Poor Law, as some earnest 
reformers* think possible, but by judicious and careful altera- 
tions in the mode of dealing with applicants for relief; and we 
venture to call attention to the points in which reform should be 
attempted, before discussing the treatment of applicants for poor- 
relief who belong to benefit societies. And, first, with regard to 
the treatment of idle and vicious able-bodied paupers. There is 
at present no provision in our unions adequate to their deserts. 
The system of administration is Aveak, and fails when applied 
to them. The cost of their maintenance and clothing should 
be exacted from the male pauper of this class. We have 
labour tests, useful in some cases, useless in others, but no 
organisation which would secure to these encumbrances of the 
community the strict necessity of earning their bread. Retain- 
ing the power of dealing with refractory and disorderly paupers 
according to the law, the guardians of the poor might be em- 
powered to draft able-bodied paupers of bad character from 
among the inmates of their union, and send them for a term to 
an establishment where work was exacted in return for mainte- 
nance.! One such establishment in each county would suffice 
for all the unions in it, and labour could be found, both 
indoors and out of doors, for its occupants, who should be kept 
there for not less than a month, and receive sufficient food 
and clothing during that time, provided that they earned it^ 
* No one has attacked the Poor Law with more hearty good-will than Mr. Cor- 
ranoc, member for East Suffolk, who maintains with Sydney Smith that it must 
not be amended, but abolished. It fails," says Mr. Corrauce, " through the abso- 
lute failure of the principle upon which it is built — the test. The vagrant laughs 
at it ; the aged and the sick are not fit objects for it, and children are beyond its 
scope. It had a work to do, and it did that work. Since that time it is obsolete. 
In these days our agents must be the actuary, the friendly society, the schoolmaster, 
and the surgeon. That a vast work of legislation lies before us, let no on- doubt- 
not less than in 1834." 
t Compare the system adopted in Belgium, p. 77.— Ed. 
VOL. VI. — S. S. H 
