Page:The English Peasant.djvu/52

 By the end of the reign of Elizabeth the voluntary offering had given place to a regular system of taxation, the amount being settled by the overseers of each parish, who were appointed every Easter Day by the Justices of the Peace. The two statutes of the 39th and 43rd of Elizabeth became the system upon which England dealt with its poor for 230 years. It was in principle a system of Christian Socialism, but being worked throughout by persons animated by secular motives, its action was vacillating: at once feeble and hard, and, in its final development, it came as near to the work of the devil as it is possible to imagine.

The Christian Socialism of the Elizabethan Poor Law distinguished, in the most forcible manner, between the idle and industrious, the wilful and the impotent. For the one class there were stripes and imprisonment, and in the end the gibbet; for the other, relief and shelter. Everything, however, depended on the honesty, capacity, and Christian spirit of the Justices of the Peace and Overseers into whose hands the whole care of the poor was confided. As early as 1622 we find signs that many shirked the work. In a tract of that date, called, "Greevous Grones for the Poor," we are told, "The poor dailie increase, in many parishes there being no collection for them, so that they are driven out of these parishes to beg, and filtch, and steal for their maintenance."

Each parish began jealously to guard its frontier, fearing that the surrounding parishes would shift upon it the burden of their poor. This led to a series of acts which virtually imprisoned the labourer in the limits of his parish, tying him down for a third time to the soil. The place of a man's nativity being originally the parish from which he could claim assistance, it became the object of every parish to prevent any being born in its limits who might come on the rates. If a young man who had no right of settlement in a parish attempted to get married, the officials immediately sought to have him removed, lest he should have a family, some of whom might become chargeable. This deterred young men from matrimony, and the result was a large number of bastard children. That unfortunate being whom the English law pursued so relentlessly: the homeless wanderer, was still more cruelly dealt with. In the reign of James I. it was enacted that a woman wandering and begging, if delivered of a child in a parish