"The hand-loom weavers arc very numerous [in Burnley.] They weave coarse calicoes, and are not able to earn more than five shillings per week."—Report of Commissioners on the Poor-laws, p. 368.
"The wages of the manufacturing people were necessarily so low that from the most laborious exertions they could hardly procure a subsistence; between six and seven shillings being the extreme weekly earnings of an industrious man; and he must work fourteen hours a day to get that sum. Mr. May, a master manufacturer, stated that he had known the time when a stockinger could earn one pound sterling per week."—Idem, p. 185.
"The price of wheat, according to the account kept at Eton College, during the first mentioned years, (1767, 1768, 1770,) was 51s. a quarter; and during 1810, 1811, its price was 110s., being a rise of 115 per cent: and Mr. Young estimates that butchers' meat had in the same period risen 146, butter 140, and cheese 153 per cent: being on an average, a rise of 138½ per cent: so that wages, as compared with these articles, had declined in the interval considerably more than one third, or 38½ per cent. And if the increased cost of tea, sugar, beer, leather, &c., besides the house-duty and window-tax, had been taken into account, the diminished power of the labourer over the necessaries and comforts of life, would have appeared still greater."—E. R. vol. xxxiii. p. 173.
"How then can we be surprised at the excess of poverty and misery which has been experienced since the peace?"—Ibid.
"The poor rates have existed more than two centuries, and they incontestibly prove the condition of the day labourer to be worse at present than at any former time during that period. This, too, should be remembered, that the condition of the middle ranks has been materially improved meanwhile: their comforts, their luxuries, their importance have been augmented ten-fold: their intellectual enjoyments have been enlarged and multiplied; the situation of the poor would be relatively worse, if they had only remained stationary, without receiving a proportional increase of comforts: but this has not been the case,— it is absolutely worse. The same quantity of labour will no longer procure the same quantity of the necessaries of life."—Q. R. vol. xv. p. 195.
"In many parishes of Kent, Suffolk, Bedford, Essex, Norfolk, &c. wages were in 1824 as low as 6d. a day, or 3s. a week: in others they amounted to 4s. and 5s.: in others again to 6s., and in some they rose as high as 9s., which was the maximum."—Ibid.
"Mr. Mahony asserts, as the result of an extensive experience in the south and west of Ireland, that the receipts of a day labourer throughout the year average but 5d. per diem. The payment for a day's work is generally from 8d. to 10d., but deducting Sundays, saints' days, bad weather, and occasional loss of time, the receipts average but half that sum."—Q. R. vol. xliv. 542.
"In the year 1786 the wages for spinning No. 100 cotton yarn was 10s. per pound; in 1790 they were reduced to 4s.; and in a few years fell to 8d.:" that is to say, one fifteenth of the wages in 1786.—Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. xxiv. p. 397.
It would appear that the facts above adduced are abundantly sufficient to put down for ever the chief ground on which the opposition to the poor-laws rests; that is, their assumed inevitable tendency to a ruinous and oppressive increase of poor rates. But unfortunately theorists blindly shut their eyes to opposing facts, and view with microscopic eye all those that appear to lend sanction to
and woolen branches, although more severely felt in these than in others. It went on in every other branch to which machinery was applicable.
| Years. | Poor taxes. | Population. | Poor rates | |
| £ | per head. | |||
| 1673 | 840,000* | 3s. | 4d. | |
| 1750 | 700,000† | 6,467,000‡ | 2s. | 2d. |
| 1770 | 1,306,000† | 7,428,000‡ | 3s. | 5d. |
| 1780 | 1,774,000† | 7,953,000† | 4s. | 4d. |
| 1790 | 2,569,009† | 8,675,000† | 5s. | 11d. |
| 1800 | 3,861,000† | 9,168,000‡ | 8s. | 5d. |
| 1810 | 5,407,000† | 10,502,500‡ | 10s. | 3d. |
| 1820 | 6,680,000† | 11,977,663‡ | 11s. | |
| * | F. M. Eden's State of the Poor, vol. i. p. 189. |
| † | Lowe on the Present State of England, pp. 185, 186 |
| ‡ | Statistical Tables, page 3. |
