badge, and be thereof convicted on oath of one witness before one justice, he shall forfeit twenty shillings by distress, half to the informer and half to the poor."
From year to year the malady has been augmenting. The amount of the poor rates in 1760 was not quite two millions: in the last fifty-six years they have quadrupled. It will not, I believe, be difficult to assign the causes that have produced this melancholy change, presenting us with such an accumulated prospect of human misery. From 1760 we may date a great revolution in the state of the country; from that period we began to become a great manufacturing nation; agriculture shortly after declined. By the politicians of those days it was viewed as a subordinate object. The wealth of the country was doubtlessly rapidly augmented: luxury spread its baneful influence through all ranks of society. The price of labour rose, and the earnings of the working classes were increased, though not their happiness. The demand for workmen in the various manufactories transferred to them numbers from the peaceful occupation of agriculture. The habits of their former lives were soon lost: higher wages were obtained, more expensive habits acquired, and no thought taken, or provision made, for any reverse. Temporary depressions of trade occurred; the numbers that were thus at once exposed to hunger and the extreme of misery were too great for private benevolence to succour: so numerous were the demands for parochial relief, that all sense of shame was lost sight of. The plague is not more rapid in its progress than this malady has proved itself. The example of one great town quickly extended to another, and in a short period pervaded the whole kingdom. To so shameless a pitch is it now arrived, that pauperism is contemplated and calculated on in the very outset of life: instances are not wanting of parties applying im-
