Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/2



to submit to the consideration of the Section the different leading principles of the legal provisions for the relief of the destitute in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and of the results of their conformity or divergence from what my colleagues of the Poor Law Commission of Inquiry agreed, upon the evidence, were the sound principles of legislation for such provisions.

Principles of a Compulsory Poor Law. At the time of the appointment of the Poor Law Commission of Inquiry in 1833, there was prevalent the theory of population by Mr. Malthus, sustained by abstract and geometrical reasoning, which attributed the existence and increase of pauperism mainly to the inevitable pressure of population on the means of subsistence, and prescribed, as the necessary remedy, the absolute repeal and disallowance of any legal provision of relief. Eminent economists and statesmen, and, indeed, most persons of intellectual rank in society, adopted this opinion as a settled conclusion, and were of opinion that all measures for the amendment of the Poor Law in England, ought to tend to its discontinuance. The evidence elicited by my own examinations, conducted, as I trust, impartially, as to any preconceived opinions, appeared to me to negative this conclusion. Everywhere the increase of pauperism and of burthens on the rates appeared to be due to the mal-administration of the legal provisions for compulsory relief, to the imbecility, or to the sinister interests of ignorant local administrators, and to habits of the recipients of the rates induced by lax administration—nowhere to the assumed inevitable pressure of a willing working population upon limited means of subsistence. My colleagues, some of them of strong preconceived opinions, yielded to this, and to concurrent testimony of other investigators to the like effect. They agreed, nevertheless, that in all extensive communities, such as ours, circumstances will occur in which an individual, by the failure of his ordinary means of subsistence, will be exposed to the danger of perishing; that to refuse relief, and, at the same time, to punish mendicity, when it cannot be proved that the mendicant could have obtained subsistence by labour, is