It is not my intention to found any part of the plan proposed on the existing poor laws, but rather to anticipate their speedy extinction, or, at least, to confine their operation to the relief of the description of poor designated by the 43d of Elizabeth; I shall not, therefore, trouble the House with more than a very cursory view of their rise and progress, in order to show their effect in destroying the comforts and happiness of those whom they have been applied to relieve.
The emancipation of the labourer from feudal bondage caused numbers to quit their former habitations, with the hope of bettering their condition. Those who were disappointed in procuring employ were driven to seek a precarious subsistence on charity. By these means mendicity was increased to a degree occasioning great inconveniences to society, and the most severe sufferings to large classes of persons. This produced a variety of statutes, permitting begging of alms, and enjoining charity towards the indigent. The author of the Mirror states, that by the common law, the poor were ordered to be subsisted by parsons, rectors of the church, and the parishioners, so that none of them die for default of subsistence. In what a state must society then have been, to induce the legislature to enforce charity by act of Parliament! The dissolution of monasteries rendered the situation of the people still more deplorable, and augmented the number of mendicants.[1] To what an extremity
- ↑ "It is curious," says Dr. Burns, in his History of the Poor Laws, "to observe the progress, by what natural steps and advances the compulsory maintenance becomes established. First the poor were restrained from begging at large, and were confined to beg within certain districts. Next the several hundreds, towns corporate, parishes, hamlets, or other like divisions, were required to sustain them with such charitable and voluntary alms, that none of them, of necessity, might be compelled to go openly in begging and the churchwardens or other substantial inhabitants were to make col-
