AN INQUIRY

INTO

THE POOR LAWS,

&c.

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

WHOEVER has attentively meditated on the present state of society, must have observed such a spirit of political inquiry abroad, as will lead eventually to the most important results. It is not enough, however, that the questions which are agitated should awaken an interest, or be pursued with keenness; but it is essential, also, that they should be entertained with a view of establishing our social polity on a permanent basis, and of simplifying the entangled web of Statute Law, which our forefathers made on the emergencies

B

pressing upon them. The subject of the Poor Laws is one, that must not be suffered to pass by with the distresses which originated its discussion. To the statesman the question obtrudes itself with the most formidable aspect; not encumbered with merely temporary difficulties, but discovering the irreparable defects of a system which has had its origin in mistaken benevolence, and in the want of correct ideas of the true subjects of legislation. Recent events, indeed, have accumulated the most alarming practical instruction; and we stand, as it were, on a point where the different streams of mischief are confluent, and threaten to lay waste the present cultivation of society.

To counteract this mischief in former times, our forefathers, with the best intentions, and in the hope of exterminating misery, established a legislative provision for the impotent and indigent. Acts of parliament without number were passed to enforce benevolence; and these have increased in every succeeding reign; so that now scarcely a session passes without an attempt at new schemes, or an alteration of the old ones. Still vice and wretchedness among the lowest class are not diminished; and though the more atrocious crimes of murder and rapine are less prevalent than formerly, yet idleness, improvidence, prostitution, and petty theft, are alarmingly increased. This

change of crimes is not to be attributed altogether to the improvement of the morals of the poor, so much as it is to the advanced state of society at large for in its earlier stages the municipal law is not sufficiently strong to vindicate itself even against the most outrageous violations; but its power increases with the progress of the community, and it becomes a more efficient instrument to repress evil. Thus the vicious are driven from one species of crime to another-less repugnant perhaps to the feelings, but equally subversive of good order and improvement.

The converse of this remark is equally applicable to the virtuous; for the more refined state of society, as it does not exhibit so many atrocious crimes, does not produce the sterner and more popular virtues of the earlier periods. For these opposite characters, though formed of such different materials, are moulded in the same stage of human feelings and opinions; and if it would be difficult to select, at the present day, three such merciless associates as the conquerors of Peru, it would be as hard to point out those who would possess the inflexible firmness and triumphant intrepidity of the martyrs cotemporary with them.

The poor, from the circumstances with which they have been surrounded, are separated from the rest of the population, and are unfortunately

influenced by many interests not incident to the remaining portion; so that they are become an excrescence on the body politic, not receiving its nourishment by a natural circulation, but from an extraneous source which ministers to a continual and growing morbidity. They are too much like what the slaves were in the ancient states of Greece and Rome, who were the plagues of the government from their having no common feeling with it.

The poor are familiar with all the crimes of civilized life without the correspondent improvement of it; and they have a vicious tameness of character increasing among them, very opposite to the mildness infused by virtue. Those who are separated from this accumulating mass of dissoluteness and delinquency by a little independence, or by superior energies, merge into it upon any sudden pressure of the times by the force of example. Such an extent of dereliction growing up in society, with such an augmentation of moral worth in the middle classes, presents a feature unexampled in history; and naturally leads us to suspect that there must be some cause operating not fully understood, or some conflicting principles existing incompatible with each other.

It is quite clear that one part of society may be refined and improved while another is degenerating. The middle class among ourselves has

lately been making rapid progress in mental and moral education. And it is not presuming more than circumstances warrant, to assert that almost all the improvement in the highest class, and certainly all in the lowest, has arisen from the healthful state of this vital core of society. History, I believe, records no example where this portion has existed in any thing like the numbers, or the wealth, or the information, which is possessed by them in Great Britain.

The same cause exists at each extremity of society to contribute to a different state of things: for those who occupy these opposite stations are not amenable to the same tribunal of public opinion as the intervening class, which by this accountability is purified of characters that are degenerate and worthless, while it raises others to eminence by the constant struggle there is to excel. There is at the two extremes a want of competition of moral qualities, without which no lasting excellence can be attained. Hence the dissoluteness which is chargeable upon the richest and the poorest in every country, beyond what is found in the middle class.

We learn from the historian Fletcher of Saltoun, who wrote in the year 1698, that there were in that day in Scotland two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. "And though the