CHAPTER XVIII.— THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
"I contend that from 1563 to 1824 a conspiracy, concocted by the law, and carried out by parties interested in its success, was entered into, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into irremediable poverty. … I am not deceived by the hypocrisy which the preamble of an Act of Parliament habitually contains. … The Act of Elizabeth declares that 'the wages of labourers are too small, and not answerable to these times'; and speaks of the 'grief and burden of the poor labourer and hired man,' and thereupon enacts a law which effectually makes the wages small … by allowing those who are interested in keeping him poor to fix the wages on which he shall subsist, and to exact a testimonial from his past employers and the overseers or churchwardens when he quitted a service, which he had to show before he entered another."—Rogers, "Six Centuries of Work and Wages," pp. 398-389.
IN the seventeenth century the wretched state and the increasing numbers of the poor much exercised people's minds.[1] Pamphlets, more than almost any other class of publications in those times, show the inner history of the nation; and the very titles of some of the seventeenth-century pamphlets are instructive. They show the poverty, and they suggest one great cause of that poverty. Here is one of 1649: "A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England, directed to all that call themselves, and are called by other lords of manors through this Nation, that have begun to cut, or that through fear and covetousness (sic) do intend to cut down the woods and trees that grow on the Commons and Waste Lands." Here we have a glimpse of the stealthy way in which enclosure crept on. Again, "Adam Moore, Gentleman," writes in 1653 on the "Enclosure of the Wastes and Common grounds of England." And in the last months of the Commonwealth we have "The Outcryes of the Poor oppressed and imprisoned, or a Safe Way to save the Poor of the Nation from Begging. W. Pryor, 1659." After the Restoration we find no end of schemes proposed, from the "Herring-
- ↑ At the same time, there was a constant alarm about depopulation.
