to take every man's cow into his park or strawyard according to the season, and to let the grass of the orchards become hay to feed the cows before and at calving time." But this excellent squire died, leaving daughters, who sold the estate to the uncle of the "present worthy possessor, Arthur Vansittart, Esq., a very amiable man, but, bred a Dutch merchant, he entered not into the economy of the poor, took away all their orchards to make a garden of thirty acres, pulled down several of the farmhouses, and many of the cottages. The consequence was that in a few years the poor tax became very high, and the poor of Shottesbrook were very poor, though they had very charitable rich neighbours." In 1745 or 1746, when the writer visited a widowed daughter of Mr Cherry's, who had returned to live in the parish, she lamented to her visitor that she had to send her man-servant two miles for milk, if she wanted more than a quart a day, and told him that she paid a twelve-penny rate to the poor three times a year. Yet in Mr Cherry's time there were under thirty houses—"I believe are now pulled down to about a dozen."
This last statement is a striking example of the amount of economic mischief done by depriving cottagers of their bit of land.
The "Friend to the Poor" contrasts the mere helping of the poor with the helping the poor to help themselves.
"Many plans are laid," he says, "to keep our poor from perishing from want of bread, hut that is the lowest link in the chain of Charily; indeed, I doubt whether it be any charity, except to ourselves—to prevent their rising and knocking us on the head. True charity to the poor, honest labourer is, to enable him to become rich: I mean comparatively rich. Let us suppose a labourer with seven children to earn 9s. a week, and my charity leads me to add to it half-a-crown; it will enable him to purchase a little piece of bacon. Suppose I give it every week; at the year's end I shall have given the poor man seven guineas, wanting one shilling, and he will be just in the same state at the year's end, still a poor starving cottager in a little hole in a village with two or three alehouses,
