Page:Poor Law Administration, its Chief Principles and their Results in England and Ireland as Compared with Scotland.djvu/7

1864.] information, to get any clear general principle appreciated, or to achieve its full practical application. In the present condition and practice of legislation, no measure based on administrative principles, partaking of science or system, goes into the House of Commons that, as a general rule, does not come out worse than it went in. The measure prepared by the Commission of Inquiry got through with less damage than most others of a systematic character, yet still it was largely and seriously altered; but nothing was taken from it that subsequent experience has not shown the necessity of having restored; and nothing was added that has not, in practice, proved to be obstructive. The supposed interests of the owners of close parishes proved to be too great for us, and we failed to obtain the repeal of the law of parochial settlement—that is, we foiled to free the circulation of labour, and to improve the quality of the labour, and to improve production and wages to the extent which must have followed upon the measures proposed. We also failed to get the administration freed, as was intended, from action of those sinister interests which operate the most powerfully in narrow areas. Farmer guardians could still give, though indirectly, out-door relief, which in effect was frequently relief in aid of the wages of their own labourers. They as well as manufacturing guardians, as employers, could still apply relief in methods to effect their local stock of labour, and to keep down its price, cheating themselves, however, by impairing its quality and value. The owners of small tenements in towns could still, as guardians, give out-door partial relief, much of which was in payment of the high rents paid by their own tenants. Shopkeepers, as guardians in towns, might still give, as they often determinedly exercised their discretion in giving out-door and partial relief, wholly in money instead of in kind, much of which money was expended in their own shops, or in the shops of their class. Mal-administration of these descriptions was checked, but not extirpated, as it might have been, and, on the whole, scope was given for the operation of an aggregation of interests which made partial and out-door relief the rule, at the expense of the ratepayer, and really of the lower classes, instead of the exception. The administrative areas for much of the business were consolidated from fifteen thousand parishes to some six hundred unions. In rural and thinly populated districts these areas were commonly sufficient; but in urban districts, what may be called natural and proper administrative areas, comprising a whole city or town, or the connected aggregation of houses with their suburbs, were cut up at the expense of efficiency and economy. Thus the city of Manchester is really cut up into four independent districts (suburban) and administrations for relief, ea«h acting without any necessary concert with the others, or any common principle with the others, each being too small to effect, at a moderate expense, those