Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/21

Rh were found were made in some measure responsible for them (so, re-introducing in a more general form the feudal arrangement of attachment to the soil, and reciprocal claim on the soil)—it was not suspected that the foundations were laid for a system which would, in after-times, bring about a demoralization threatening general ruin. When, in subsequent centuries, to meet the evils of again-increasing vagrancy which punishment failed to repress, these measures, reenacted with modifications, ended in making the people of each parish chargeable with the maintenance of their poor, while it reestablished the severest penalties on vagabondage, even to death without benefit of clergy, no one ever anticipated that, while the penal elements of this legislation would by-and-by become so mollified as to have little practical effect in checking idleness, the accompanying arrangements would eventually take such forms as immensely to encourage idleness. Neither legislators nor others foresaw that in 230 years the poor's-rate, having grown to seven millions, would become a public spoil of which we read that—

As sequences of the law of Elizabeth, no one imagined that, in rural districts, farmers, becoming chief administrators, would pay part of their men's wages out of the rates (so taxing the rest of the rate-payers for the cultivation of their fields); and that this abnormal relation of master and man would entail bad cultivation. No one imagined that, to escape poor's-rates, landlords would avoid building cottages, and would even clear cottages away; so causing overcrowding, with consequent evils, bodily and mental. No one imagined that workhouses, so called, would become places for idling in; and places where married couples, habitually residing, displayed their "elective affinities" time after time. Yet these, and detrimental results which it would take pages to enumerate, culminating in that general result most detrimental of all—helping the worthless to multiply at the expense of the worthy—finally came out of these measures taken ages ago merely to mitigate certain immediate evils.

Is it not obvious, then, that only in the course of those long periods