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ONE HOUR SPENT IN SOBERLY LOOKING INTO THE RIGHTS OF THINGS, IS MORE LIKELY TO MAKE MEN ACT WITH GOOD SENSE, AND WITH EFFECT, THAN WHOLE YEARS SPENT IN CLAMOROUS RAILING.-Cobbett.

THE LAW not only regards life and member, and protects every man in the enjoyment of them; but also furnishes him with every thing necessary for their support. For there is no man so indigent or wretched, but he may demand a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life from the more opulent part of the community, by means of the several statutes enacted for the relief of the poor: a humane provision, dictated by the principles of society.Blackstone (Book 1. Chap. 1.)

Why is it that the young are so frequently forced to premature labour? Why is it that, even with laws to a certain extent restricting the years at which they should be employed, there is a constant tendency to evade those laws, and that on the part of parents as well as on the part of masters? Why is it that so many labouring parents in this country, become as it were slavedealers in their own flesh and blood, and sell the bones and muscles of their offspring to that premature toil which withers and cripples human beings, soul and body together? Is this a spontaneous line of conduct? I'll not believe it. There may be a few depraved exceptions, but in general it is the scorpion lash of gaunt famine that drives them on to such a course; it is the hard urging of necessity; it is the same impulse in kind, though not so strong in degree, as that which makes the longing of the cannibal arise in crews of shipwrecked sailors; the same in kind, though happily inferior in degree, as that which made the delicate woman, during the protracted beleagueriment of Jerusalem by the Romans, seethe her own child in the pot for food. It is the unnatural state of society which goads them on to that, which violates not only the dictates of human nature, of true and loving human nature, but even the animal instinct of paternity.—W. J. Fox.

Rich and Poor.-The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor; and it is no less obvious that the number of the former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich; and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burthens of the poor. In a state of nature it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours. In a state of artificial society, it is a law as constant and as invariable, that those who labour most, enjoy the fewest things; and that those who labour not at all, have the greatest number of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange beyond expression. We scarce believe a thing when we are told it, which we actually see before our eyes every day without being the least surprised. I suppose that there are in Great Britain upwards of an hundred thousand people employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in the bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal task, without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. An hundred thousand more, at least, are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of these mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent

persons were condemned to so intolerable a slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment? This is an instance, I could not wish a stronger, of the numberless things which we pass by in their common dress, yet which shock us when they are nakedly represented. But this number, considerable as it is, and the slavery, with all its baseness, and horror, which we have at home, is nothing to what the rest of the world affords of the same nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic; to say nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretchedness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous lost children of her army. Would any rational man submit to one of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial enjoyments which policy has made to result from them? By no means. And yet I need suggest, that those who find the means, and those who arrive at the end, are not all the same persons. The blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy and villainy of the other has been the real builder of this respectable fabric of political society. And as the blindness of mankind has caused their slavery, in return, their state of slavery is made a pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness; for the politician will tell you gravely, that their life of servitude disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for the search of truth, and supplies them with no other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is one of the reasons for which I blame such institutions.

In a misery of this sort, admitting some few lenities, and those too but a few, nine parts in ten of the whole race of mankind drudge through life. Burke.-Vindication of Natural Society.

POOR-LAWS.

"THE poor have a claim founded in the law of nature:-All things were originally common. No one being able to produce a charter from heaven, had any better title to a particular possession than his next neighbour."-Archdeacon Paley's Moral Philosophy.

"The state is bound to supply the necessities of the aged, the sick, and the orphan. Those alms, which are given to a naked man in the streets, do not fulfil the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen A CERTAIN SUBSISTENCE. THE RICHES OF A STATE ARISE FROM THE LABOUR OF THE PEOPLE. Therefore the state owes to every citizen a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health."-Montesquieu.

"No man could ever have a just power over the life of another by right of property in land or possessions.-A man can no more make use of another's necessity to force him to become his vassal, by withholding that relief which God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and, with a dagger at his throat, offer him death or slavery."-Locke.

"The POOR-LAW BILL was, as we have seen, proposed, on the express grounds, that it was necessary to preserve the lords' estates from the grasp of the poor people.-This was the great alleged ground for the passing of this bill."-Cobbett's Legacy to Labourers.

Now the birth of the NEW POOR-LAW was on this wise. It happened that the Labouring Population of England fell among thieves, which stripped them; and the Government (alias, the monied classes), requiring their further service, found it expedient to allow them a certain subsistence to keep them in working condition. There is not always honour among-the dispensers of "relief" to paupers. The rate-payers scrupled not to rob each other; and certain paupers, not convinced of the policy of returning good for evil, scrupled as little to employ any manoeuvres for the sake of filling their own pockets, no matter at whose expense. In few words, the rich were quarrelling about their several proportions of the burthen of supporting their slaves; and some of the slaves were earnest in overreaching as much as possible those who had (honestly?) impoverished them. To redeem society

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from these evils, "to make the support and discipline of the indigent consistent with the rights and interests of the independent," to save the property of the rich from the encroachment of the poor, the POOR-LAW AMENDMENT ACT visited our earth. We proceed to establish the truth of our position.

Labour expended upon unclaimed land constitutes the only just title to property. In the early stages of society, every man was the rightful proprietor of the piece of ground which his own labour had rendered valuable; and no man thought of denying the right of his fellow to support himself by his own labour, on his native earth. At length Might overthrew Right and men were denied the enjoyment of the fruit of their own toil, and compelled to labour for the benefit of others. The title of our English Landlords can claim no higher authority than the Norman Conquest. The lands were possessed by force. The natural right of the natives to subsistence remained the same: and still remains. While the land is capable of affording sufficient sustenance for all its inhabitants, every one of them is entitled to support. Previous to the Reformation, provision was made out of the revenues of the church, for the maintenance of the aged, the infirm, and the destitute. When the founders of the English Episcopacy dispossessed the Romish hierarchy, they forgot to apply this fund as it had been previously applied; and they converted it to their own particular use. The poor being thus robbed necessitated the Act of Elizabeth for their relief by parochial rates, as a compensation for their plunder by the protestant clergy, the establishers of "the poor man's church." Latterly it was said, that this Act was much abused: that the indigent claimed as a right to be supported out of the produce of the land, whether they worked incessantly, or not; that many of them, by fraudulent means, succeeded in obtaining more than actual necessaries; and that some even refused any labour in return for their support; that the rate-payers were taxed unequally; that the number of those who preferred idleness to severe and incessant exertion was so great, that there was fear of the wealthy becoming poor, and of the nobles and hereditary idlers being driven to take their turn in labouring for a scanty livelihood; that the poor were being rapidly demoralized and the better classes fast sinking into poverty. It was necessary to put a stop to this: and the Amendment Act was prescribed. "AN ACT FOR THE AMENDMENT AND BETTER ADMINISTRATION OF THE LAWS RELATING TO THE POOR IN ENGLAND AND WALES." Was this an Act to grapple with the Social Disease? With the mass of the population on the brink of pauperism, was it sufficient to alter and amend the Laws relating to the relief of the Poor, to regulate palliatives to be applied, while the root of the evil remained unattended to and uninterfered with? The Preamble of the Act runs thus :"Whereas it is expedient to alter and amend the Laws relating to the Relief of poor Persons in England and Wales: Be it therefore enacted, &c."-It was expedient to alter those laws-expedient certainly for those who are in the habit of making the laws, who are neither the Poor nor the Tribunes of the Poor! The provisions of the Act, the "information" upon which it was founded, plainly testify, that the relief of the rate-payers was the object of the Act: there is not, in any one clause, the least evidence of a desire of relieving the Poor. But let that pass. Had the Act been so framed as to provide for

See the Report entitled-Extracts from the Information received by His Majesty's Commissioners, as to the Administration and Operation of the Poor-laws. PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY. 1833-This "Information" appears to be derived from the most "respectable" sources. No evidence from the poor themselves; but the whole of the information is drawn from the ratepayers, whose disinterestedness and impartiality are sufficiently indicated throughout the Report. We would also beg to remark that the figure-statements in the "Extracts" are often incorrect, too often to be satisfactorily accounted for as typographical errors.

Another reason for the "amendment" of the Poor-laws might possibly have been the refractory and turbulent spirit manifested by not a small number of the serfs. And even the "amendment" has not quieted them. Strange that they cannot be persuaded to be quiet under the operation of the many legal torturings. Good legislators! try the race of eels with your philosophy. "Down, wantons! Are you not used to it? Have not eels heen skinned alive ever since humanity took to fishing! Writhing Individual! have not your ancestors been

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the comfortable support of all who were reduced to a state of destitution, it would still have fallen short of the need of the community. When will the rulers of nations understand, or rather, when will they acknowledge by their acts, that it is the business of legislation to eradicate the causes of evil and so to prevent the occasion for relief. The information received by the Commissioners, "as to the administration and operation of the Poor-laws," clearly proved the existence of almost universal dishonesty on the part of the respectable classes, as well towards those of their own condition, as towards the labouring poor, by whose industry their wealth had been created, and who, on every principle of justice, ay, and of expediency, were entitled to be supported out of the proceeds of their own labour. There was also abundant evidence that the Poor were in a state of most degrading and debasing vassalage, a state of dependence acknowledged on all hands to be productive of the most systematic falsehood and the worst vices. No inquiry was instituted to ascertain the real causes of this universal depravity. It was asked-Why do the rate-payers rob each other by their "jobbing" and by unequally dividing the burthen of the rates? It was answered-Because there was no act of parliament to regulate parochial affairs, to compel an equal method of rating:and the answer was considered satisfactory. It was not asked, whether the general dishonesty might not be in some measure occasioned by the demoralizing effects of Commerce, which justifies fraud, and permits lying to be a part of every man's stock in trade. It was asked-Why are the labourers reckless and improvident, saving nothing out of their superfluous earnings for the support of their worn-out age? It was answered-Because they know that they can demand to be supported by their parishes:-and the answer was deemed sufficient. There was no further looking into the matter. There was no inquiry as to the deeper causes; whether the injustice which gave to one man the privilege of idleness, without curtailing his revenue, and thereby necessitated the doubling of another's labour, might not have something to do with the evil. Yesterday's Cause was sufficient for the Commissioners. They inquired not into principles, into the cause of the immediate and proximate "causes." Perhaps they were not authorized to refer to principles; but why then were two dignitaries of our holy Church, two ministers of the Word of Truth employed on an inquiry void of principle?

In the Report on which the relief Act was founded, it was stated that improvident marriages were common among the Poor, and that, thereby, the race of misery increased, the sufferings of the many were aggravated. Could no better remedy be suggested, than "the deferral of the poor man's marriage," to prevent the poverty which rendered the satisfaction of a natural necessity improvident? Might it not be of as much utility to educate the whole community, in order that, when any should be placed in circumstances which might render self-denial a prudential thing, they might perceive the prudence, and act accordingly?-It was observed that public and private charities occasioned a dependence which aggravated the miseries they were intended to relieve. It was not proposed to destroy this evil by rendering justice to all classes of the community, and so superseding charity; to fairly distribute the means of subsistence and enjoyment, so that none should be indebted to another for the "gift" of that which was his own by the law of Nature. It was asserted that allowances of out-door relief were of injurious

skinned before you? Reverence their wisdom! Would you be better off than they were? It is unpleasant."

The bishop of London and the bishop of Chester were the first on the list of these Commissioners of Inquiry.

+ So encouraging prostitution with its train of horrible evils: for a man's natural appetites are not quieted by deferring their gratification. A starving man will hardly destroy his hunger by deferring the luxury of eating.

"Great harm is done to the labourer by the public contributions from the rich. These public charities create the necessity they relieve, but they do not relieve all the necessity they create.-Mr. Wilson's Report from Durham, p. 180 of the "Extructs, received," &c.

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