Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/638

624 the magistrates and the clergy were ordered to make collections for their relief. These were the first approaches to a poor-law, and in the year 1562 Queen Elizabeth passed an Act making parochial assessments for the poor compulsory. The poor-law, therefore, in reality dates from that period; but in the year 1601, the celebrated Act of the 43rd of Elizabeth organised and completed that system of employing and maintaining the destitute poor, which has remained for ever the law of England.

Such was the sixteenth century in England; a period more remarkable than any which had gone before it, and which, with all its dark and repulsive features, was the gloomy dawn of the glorious day which we now enjoy. It was an age in which the whole system of society was in a state of convulsion, in which whatever was antiquated, contracted, or rotten, was severed and thrown down; and the seeds of a thousand new things thrown into the upturned soil, already showed those vigorous germs and shoots which have ever since been growing and ripening into a country and a moral and political condition which have no parallel.

  