In the first place,there was the war between parishes.The law of settlement --which was to decide to what parish a pauper belonged --originated in an act of 1662.Eden observes that the short clause in this short act had brought more profit to the lawyers than 'any other point in the English jurisprudence.'(4)It is said that the expense of such a litigation before the act of 1834averaged from £300,000to £350,000a year.(5)Each parish naturally endeavoured to shift the burthen upon its neighbours;and was protected by laws which enabled it to resist the immigration of labourers or actually to expel them when likely to become chargeable.This law is denounced by Adam Smith(6)as a 'violation of natural liberty and justice.'It was often harder,he declared,for a poor man to cross the artificial boundaries of his parish than to cross a mountain ridge or an arm of the sea.There was,he declared,hardly a poor man in England over forty who had not been at some time 'cruelly oppressed'by the working of this law.Eden thinks that Smith had exaggerated the evil:but a law which operated by preventing a free circulation of labour,and made it hard for a poor man to seek the best price for his only saleable commodity,was,so far,opposed to the fundamental principles common to Smith and Eden.The law,too,might be used oppressively by the niggardly and narrow minded.The overseer,as Burn complained,(7)was often a petty tyrant:his aim was to depopulate his parish;to prevent the poor from obtaining a settlement;to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the management of a bully;and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor.This explains the view taken by Arthur Young,and generally accepted at the period,that the poor-law meant depopulation.
Workhouses had been started in the seventeenth century(8)with the amiable intention of providing the industrious poor with work.Children might be trained to industry and the pauper might be made self-supporting.Workhouses were expected that is,to provide not only work but wages.Defoe,in his Giving Alms no Charity,pointed out the obvious objections to the workhouse considered as an institution capable of competing with the ordinary industries.
Workhouses,in fact,soon ceased to be profitable.Their value,however,in supplying a test for destitution was recognised;and by an act of 1722,parishes were allowed to set up workhouses,separately or in combination,and to strike off the lists of the poor those who refused to enter them.
This was the germ of the later 'workhouse test.'(9)When grievances arose,the invariable plan,as Nicholls observes,(10)was to increase the power of the justices.Their discretion was regarded 'as a certain cure for every shortcoming of the law and every evil arising out of it.'The great report of 1834traces this tendency(11)to a clause in an act passed in the reign of William III,which was intended to allow the justices to check the extravagance of parish officers.They were empowered to strike off persons improperly relieved.This incidental regulation,widened by subsequent interpretations,allowed the magistrates to order relief,and thereby introduced an incredible amount of demoralisation.
The course was natural enough,and indeed apparently inevitable.The justices of the peace represented the only authority which could be called in to regulate abuses arising from the incapacity and narrow local interests of the multitudinous vestries.The schemes of improvement generally involved some plan for a larger area.If a hundred or a county were taken for the unit,the devices which depopulated a parish would no longer be applicable.(12)The only scheme actually carried was embodied in 'Gilbert's act'(1782),obtained by Thomas Gilbert (1720-1798),an agent of the duke of Bridgewater,and an active advocate of poor-law reform in the House of Commons.This scheme was intended as a temporary expedient during the distress caused by the American War;and a larger and more permanent scheme which it was to introduce failed to become law.It enabled parishes to combine if they chose to provide common workhouses,and to appoint 'guardians.'The justices,as usual,received more powers in order to suppress the harsh dealing of the old parochial authorities.
The guardians,it was assumed,could always find 'work,'and they were to relieve the able-bodied without applying the workhouse test.The act,readily adopted,thus became a landmark in the growth of laxity.(13)At the end of the century a rapid development of pauperism had taken place.
The expense,as Eden had to complain,had doubled in twenty years.This took place simultaneously with the great development of manufactures.It is not perhaps surprising,though it may be melancholy,that increase of wealth shall be accompanied by increase of pauperism.Where there are many rich men,there will be a better field for thieves and beggars.A life of dependence becomes easier though it need not necessarily be adopted.Whatever may have been the relation of the two phenomena,the social revolution made the old social arrangements more inadequate.great aggregations of workmen were formed in towns,which were still only villages in a legal sense.Fluctuations of trade,due to war or speculation,brought distress to the improvident;and the old assumption that every man had a proper place in a small circle,where his neighbours knew all about him,was further than ever from being verified.