1816.]

LAW OF SETTLEMENT.

67

houses in the immediate vicinity of Portman Square, where more than seven hundred Irish lived in the most complete distress and profligacy; and they were told that the court was totally neglected by the parish; that it was never cleaned; that people were afraid to enter it from dread of contagion. In George Yard, Whitechapel, they were informed that there were two thousand people, occupying forty houses, in a similar state of wretchedness. Much more of this was told the Committee; but the evil was exhibited and forgotten. Legislation for Public Health was unknown till 1848, except in the old laws of quarantine. Very much of what was called the vagrancy of the metropolis was a natural consequence of the administration of the Poor Laws throughout the kingdom. A large proportion of the money raised for the relief of the poor was expended in shifting the burthen of their relief from one parish to another; and Middlesex kept a number of functionaries in active operation, to get rid of the vagrants that crowded into London, by passing them out of the limits of the metropolitan county, to return, of course, on the first convenient occasion. As Middlesex worked under the Law of Settlement, so worked the whole kingdom. An intelligent foreigner, who travelled in England in 1810, saw how the poor were repulsed from one parish to another "like infected persons. They are sent back from one end of the kingdom to the other, as criminals formerly in France, de brigade en brigade. You meet on the high roads, I will not say often but too often, an old man on foot with his little bundle-a helpless widow, pregnant perhaps, and two or three barefooted children following her become paupers in a place where they had not yet acquired a legal right to assistance, and sent away, on that account, to their original place of settlement."* This Law of Settlement was in full operation, playing its fantastic tricks from the Channel to the Tweed, when the peace filled the land with disbanded seamen and other servants of war; and agricultural labourers, who could find no employ at home, were wandering, as it was called, to search for capital in some unknown region where capital was seeking for labour. The statute of 1662, the foundation of the Law of Settlement,† forbade this wandering, and gave a very amusing explanation of the ground of its prohibitions: "Whereas, by reason of some defects in the law, poor people are not restrained from going from one parish to another, and therefore do endeavour to settle themselves in those parishes where there is the best stock." The great natural law of labour seeking exchange with capital was to be resisted, by a law which declared that those who sought to effect this exchange were "rogues and vagabonds." In this spirit agricultural parishes very generally came to the resolution of employing none but their own parishioners. "The immediate consequence of this determination was, the removal of numbers of the most industrious families from homes where they had lived in comfort, and without parish relief, all their lives, to a workhouse in the parish to which they belonged."+

It was not till 1861 that the wedge was introduced that might break up the selfish and ignorant laws for the removal of the poor. One of the

68

GENERAL ADMINISTRATION OF POOR LAWS.

[1816.

greatest evils attending the parochial terror of new settlers was the filthy and ruinous state of the dwellings of agricultural labourers. The evil has been remedied in some degree, but in too many districts it exists now as it existed when Simond "asked proprietors of land, or farmers, why they did not build houses for their labourers ;" and was told that "far from building, they would rather pull down such houses." The labourers were crowded in hovels of the adjacent town or village. Cottages were not built or properly upheld in agricultural parishes, for what capitalist would speculate in houses. for the labourers, when the most industrious might be hurried away at the bidding of the overseer? The tyranny seems likely to be destroyed by the intelligence which, sooner or later, sweeps away the great or the petty tyrant.

On the 28th of May, Mr. Curwen, an intelligent agriculturist, brought the subject of the Poor Laws before the House of Commons, on a motion for the appointment of a Committee of Inquiry. Mr. Curwen had a plan-as many others had their plans. His scheme formed small part of the deliberations of the Committee, which reported in 1817. Their recommendations for the remedy of the enormous evil of the existing Poor Laws did not penetrate beneath the surface. In 1816 the amount of poor-rate levied was 6,937,4251. This charge was at the rate of 12s. 44d. per head upon the population of England and Wales. The average annual expenditure for the relief of the poor had gradually increased from about two millions at the commencement of the war, to seven millions at its close. A very large portion of the money that had been spent in fostering pauperism during the war years, by parish allowances in aid of wages, represents the amount of degradation and misery which the labourers endured, as compared with their unallowanced forefathers. The national debt represents, in a great degree, the money expended in unprofitable wars,-the waste of capital upon objects that can only be justified by the last necessity, and which are the result of those evil passions which the improved knowledge and virtue of mankind may in time root out. In the same way, had the money expended upon fostering pauperism been raised upon loan, we should have had an amount of some two hundred millions, representing, in a like degree, the waste of capital expended in drying up the sources of industry and skill, and paying the alms of miserable indigence instead of the wages of contented labour. It is difficult to conceive a more complete state of degradation than the allowanced labourers exhibited in 1816. With the feudal servitude had passed away the feudal protection. The parish servitude imposed the miseries and contumelies of slavery, without its exemption from immediate care and future responsibility. The old workhouse system was as productive of evil in principle, though not in amount, as the allowance system. In the parish workhouses the consequences of want of classification and bad management operated with the greatest hardship upon children. Habits were formed in the workhouse which rendered the path to respectability almost inaccessible. These children were disposed of under the apprenticing system, and were doomed to a dreary period of servitude, under some needy master who had been tempted in the first instance to take them by the offer of a small

* Purdy, "On the English Poor Rate."

1816.]

INQUIRY INTO THE STATE OF EDUCATION.

69

premium. The parochial plan of putting out children, with its attendant evils, was a necessary consequence of the want of training while in the workhouse.

In 1807, Mr. Whitbread proposed to the House of Commons a very large and comprehensive measure of Poor-Law Reform. The principles which he advocated were those of real statesmanship. To arrest the constant progress of pauperism, he desired to raise the character of the labouring classes. He called upon the country to support a plan of general national education; he proposed a method under which the savings of the poor might be properly invested in a great national bank. At the period when Mr. Whitbread brought forward his plan of Poor-Law Reform, the system of mutual instruction, introduced by Lancaster and Bell, was attracting great attention. Too much importance was perhaps at first attached to the mechanical means of education then recently developed; but the influence was favourable to the establishment of schools by societies and individuals. The Government left the instruction of the people to go on as it might, without a single grant, for more than a quarter of a century.

From 1807 to the close of the war, the Legislature heard no word on the Education of the People. The man who for forty-five years has devoted much of his untiring energy to this great question, had in 1816 come back to the place in the councils of the nation which he won in 1812 by a combination of industry and talent almost unprecedented. Henry Brougham had not been in Parliament for three years. On the 21st of May, 1816, he moved for the appointment of a Select Committee " to inquire into the state of the Education of the lower orders of the people in London, Westminster, and Southwark.” The motion, which was brought forward with great caution by the mover, was unopposed. The Committee made its first report on the 20th of June, having conducted its inquiries with more than usual activity. The energy of Mr. Brougham, who acted as chairman, gave a remarkable impulse to this important investigation. It was found that in the metropolis there were a hundred and twenty thousand children without the means of education. The principal labours of the Committee had consisted in their examination of evidence as to the number and condition of the charity and parish schools destined for the education of the lower orders. The number of such institutions exceeded anything that could have been previously believed; but the expenditure of the funds was, in many cases, neither pure nor judicious. A few were educated and brought up— the many were neglected. In the country, instances of flagrant abuses had been heard of. Mr. Brougham's Report produced no hostile feelings on this occasion. In 1818 the powers of inquiry granted to the Committee were no longer confined to the metropolis. Then the larger question of the extension. of education was merged in a furious controversy as to the amount of abuses in endowed charities, and the propriety of subjecting the higher schools, such as Eton and Winchester, and also Colleges in the Universities, to a searching inquiry into the nature of their statutes, and their adherence to the objects of their foundation. An Act was subsequently passed, in consequence of the Jabours of the Committee, to appoint Commissioners to inquire concerning the abuse of Charities connected with Education; and by a second Act the right of inquiry was extended to all charities, the Universities and certain

70

SAVINGS-BANKS.

[1816. great Foundation schools excepted. The Education Commission was thus merged in the Charity Commission. Of the great national benefits that resulted from that Commission no one can doubt. But it may be doubted whether the controversial shape which the question of education assumed in 1818 did much to advance the disposition which prevailed in 1816, to provide a general system of popular instruction. From some unhappy prejudice— from apathy, or from cowardice-the education of the people made small legislative progress for twenty years. Perhaps the old fable of the sun and the wind experimenting upon the removal of the traveller's cloak, may afford us some solution of this problem. But the Reports of the Education Committee were of the highest value in showing us the extent of instruction at the time of its labours. There were 18,500 schools, educating 644,000 children; of this number 166,000 were educated at endowed schools, and 478,000 at unendowed schools, during six days of the week. This number was independent of Sunday schools, of which there were 5100, attended by 452,000 children; but of course many of these Sunday scholars were included in the returns of other schools.

In the plan of Poor-Law Reform brought forward by Mr. Whitbread in 1807, he earnestly advocated the consideration of a mode by which the savings of the poor might be safely and profitably invested. Three or four years previous, Mr. Malthus, in his "Essay on Population," had argued that “it might be extremely useful to have county banks, where the smallest sums would be received, and a fair interest granted for them." Mr. George Rose had, as early as 1793, legislated for the encouragement of Friendly Societies. In 1798 a bank for the earnings of poor children was established at Tottenham; and this was found so successful, that a bank for the safe deposit of the savings of servants, labourers, and others, was opened at the same place in 1804. Interest was here allowed to the depositors. A similar institution was founded at Bath in 1808. But the greatest experiment upon the possibility of the labouring poor making considerable savings was tried in Scotland. "The Parish Bank Friendly Society of Ruthwell" was established by the Rev. Henry Duncan in 1810. The first London Savings-Bank did not commence its operations till January, 1816. In the Parliamentary Session of 1816, Mr. Rose brought in a bill for the regulation of Savings-Banks, which was subsequently withdrawn for revision. Of the possible benefits of these institutions there could be no doubt in the minds of all men who were anxious to improve the condition of the people. "What a bubble!" wrote Cobbett.

In the Session of 1816 one step was made towards some improvement of that code which Blackstone termed a "a bastard slip of the old forest laws; ... both productive of the same tyranny to the Commons, but with this difference,that the forest laws established only one mighty hunter throughout the land; the game-laws have raised a little Nimrod in every manor." The attention of the House of Commons was called to this subject in consequence of the murder of colonel Berkeley's gamekeeper by a gang of armed poachers; and a Committee was appointed to take into consideration the laws relating to game."* They came to the Resolution, "that it is the opinion

Hansard, vol. xxxiv. col. 586.

1816.]

GAME-LAWS.

71

of this Committee, that all game should be the property of the person upon whose lands such game should be found." They contemplated the removal of the qualification to kill game-that law which had its beginning in the reign of Richard II., and which, perfected by the aristocratic legislators of the time of Charles II., required "fifty times the property to enable a man to kill a partridge as to vote for a knight of the shire."* The Committee of 1816 evidently pointed to the necessity of "removing the restraints upon the sale of game.' It was not till after fifteen years of controversy that the statute of William IV. dispensed with the qualification for killing game, and legalized its sale. The statute of the 9th of George IV., and that of William IV., rendered the law more stringent and effective against poaching, especially by night. The number of convictions under the Acts for the preservation of game furnish no uncertain test, not only of the state of morals amongst the agricultural labourers, but of the presence or absence of those qualities which make the landed proprietor a blessing or a curse to his humble neighbours. In the more daring and depraved of the population of the rural districts, the severe administration of the game-laws produced a spirit such as was displayed in January, 1816, by the Berkeley poachers, who cried out "Glory! glory!" when they had killed one gamekeeper and wounded six others.t