Page:The English Peasant.djvu/54

 labourer in their hands. "Jack," said a gentleman of very high quality, when after the debate in the House of Lords, King William was voted on the vacant throne; "Jack," says he, "God damn ye; Jack, go home to your lady, and tell her we have got a Protestant King and Queen; and go and make a bonfire as big as a house, and bid the butler make ye all drunk, ye dog."

To ask legislators of this sort to listen to proposals like those of Mr. Locke, even though they had King William's support, was casting pearls before swine. So nothing came of the idea, borrowed from the original Elizabethan legislation, of founding working schools where the children of those unable to maintain their families could be fed and employed instead of money for the purpose being directly given to the heads of those families.

A similar fate at first befell Sir Humphrey Mackworth's scheme for setting up workhouses, perhaps owing to Defoe's clever pamphlet entitled, "Giving Alms no Charity" However, in 1723, Parliament determined to try the workhouse system and by 9 Geo. I., c. 7, it was enacted that relief should only be given on condition of entering a workhouse; i.e., that an Englishman who fell into poverty should only be relieved on condition of surrendering what has been trumpeted forth as the birthright of every native of this country.

It was soon seen that to make this system effectual, the workhouse must be more miserable and the diet poorer than that to which the labouring class were accustomed. Workhouses were accordingly managed by contract, and ere long they became one of those horrors, the frequent end of institutions founded on one principle and worked on another. Crabbe, whose profound sympathy for the poor and photographic pictures of their misery will render his fame immortal, thus describes the Village Workhouse in 1783. He is speaking of the final fate of worn-out agricultural labourers—

Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor. Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day— There children dwell who know no parents' care: Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there!