1. The dishonest system pursued by the manufacturers and agriculturists, whereby they combine to reduce wages below the minimum necessary for the support of those they employ, and force the overseers to make up the difference.
2. The support, by a regular weekly stipend, of masses of able-bodied men, without exacting any labour in return, and without regard to character or conduct; whereby thieves, rogues, and pickpockets are enabled to live in idleness, and enjoy in many instances more of the necessaries of life than the honest and industrious poor; thus destroying all stimuli to industry or regard to character.
3. Supporting at a heavy expense the mothers of hosts of illegitimate children; thus offering a premium to lewdness.
Of each in turn: and first, of the dishonest combination to reduce wages.
"A practice had obtained, of labourers being engaged at half or even one-third of the usual rate of wages, upon an understanding with their employers, that the difference would be made up to them from the parochial funds."—Information received from his Majesty's Commissioners, as to the Administration of the Poor-laws, p. 163.
"The elders [a self-elected body of magistrates] of Hartland, in Devonshire, meet once in the beginning of the month, and dine at the parish expense, asking friends to dine with them. Some time after dinner, the paupers who cannot get work are brought in one by one, are put up to auction, and the elders bid according to the value they fix upon them; the difference with what is necessary for their subsistence being made up from the rates."—Idem, p. 166.
"By combining together, as they almost uniformly do, the farmers in agricultural parishes can reduce the rate of wages to any limit they please. They are enabled to do this, because the parish, by granting such a supplementary allowance to the labourer as will support him and his family, prevents him from emigrating to another district, as he would most certainly do, were his employers to attempt artificially to depress his wages in a county unfettered by this system."—E. R. vol. xlvii. p. 322.
"Its effect is to force the occupiers of villas, as well as shopkeepers, tradesmen, &c., or those who do not employ labourers, to pay a portion of the wages of those who do: and thus to place every farmer, who might be disposed to act on a more liberal system, in a relatively disadvantageous situation! The farmers are in this way led to encourage a system which fraudulently imposes a heavy burden upon others."—Ibid.
"Instead of securing a refuge for the really destitute, the poor-laws have been perverted in the southern counties to the very worst purposes: they have been made a means of reducing wages to the lowest level, of pauperising the whole population, and of throwing a large proportion of the expense of labour upon those who do not employ a single labourer. This perversion began in 1795."—E. R. vol. liii. p. 46.
"Persons who have no need of farm labour are obliged to contribute to the payment of work done for others. This must be the case wherever the labourers, necessarily employed by the farmers, receive from the parish any part of the wages, which, if not so paid, would be paid by the farmers themselves."—E. R. vol. liii. p. 50.
"And for what object are three fourths of mankind thus degraded and kept down? The immediate gain is the master's; but that is only a temporary advantage, followed by a train of bad consequences, from which the masters and the whole community suffer."—E. R. vol. xxii. p. 198.
"We have had silk-masters who have made rapid fortunes by giving their men low wages, and driving them on the parish for the rest of their means of subsistence."—Commissioners' Report on the Poor-laws, p. 277.
"Wherever this pernicious system has been fully matured, it has, as might have been anticipated, produced an entire revolution in the manners and habits of the working classes. Every incentive to individual exertion it has abolished; every motive of sobriety, steadiness, honesty, it has utterly destroyed. Among them exists no longer any anxiety about the interests of their employer, or any regard for their own character: for what motive is there to induce a labourer to work hard, when he is aware that he will be paid, not in proportion to the quantity of work done by him, but according to a general standard established in the parish!"—Q. R. vol. xxxiii. p. 449.
Next, of the support by the overseers of the idle, the lazy, the worthless, of thieves, and able-bodied rogues and vagabonds.
