THE DISASTER OF THE POOR LAWS.

The Poor Law of England has proved the source of wide-spread social disaster. In every century since HENRY VIII.'s reign attempts have been made to amend it, and society has been burdened with the evils it has accumulated. The British Government at the present time are discussing the provisions of a new measure affecting the poor of the metropolis, who, year by year, are hanging with a heavier weight upon the wheels of industry. Every year tho existing law breaks down under the increasing burden it attracts to itself, and is the occasion of fresh legislation and additional outlay. Nor can this be wondered at. The principles on which it is founded were designed in profound ignorance, or culpable disregard of those which the providence of GOD has ordained for the basis and cement of the social fabric. It is difficult to understand why the 43rd of ELIZABETH should have been so much extolled, except that it may be regarded as a humanitarian reaction from what have been termed the "bloody Acts" which her father was obliged, according to FROUDE, to enact for the repression of vagabonds and hordes of peripatetic sowers of seditious seed. Although HENRY'S remedy for a thriftless, lazy population is altogether too sharp for our day, it seems better adapted to foster the self reliance of the people under his government than the legislation which followed it. The Poor Law of subsequent Governments has so officiously cared for the poor man that, in localities where the system has deeply rooted itself, he has ceased to care for himself. "He stands," as a celebrated political economist has said, "released from the office of being his own protector, or the protector of his own house." Pauperism has not emancipated him from distress, but from duty. The ties of relationship are ruptured, and the best arrangements of nature and Providence for the moral discipline of society are frustrated. Not only do parents and children mutually abandon each other, but "between the higher and lower classes of the land lies a great chasm, across which the two parties look at each other with all the fierceness and suspicion of natural enemies." This is not by any means a pleasant state of things, or one upon which a statesman can be supposed to look with satisfaction. "The poor," by Divine ordinance we are told, " we shall have always among us;" but it does not follow that we must set up such modes of relief as will deprave those whom we relieve. Dr CHALMERS was not far wrong when he said, "Had there never been any charity by law in England, charity by love would both have had less to do and done her office with greater alacrity. The law has both augmented human want and it has enfeebled human sympathy "

This opinion was not the result of mere theorem on the subject, but of extensive experience drawn from a practical acquaintance with the relief of the poor under two systems ; one devised by himself, wherein the indigent were judiciously relieved without imperilling the mainspring of manhood—self reliance ; the other system, wherein that mainspring was tampered with, although, at that time not so much as it was by the English system. The public charity of Scotland was less pernicious than that of England, just in proportion as it deviated less from nature. He had, as he states, "breathed in both elements," in that of a parish where legal charity was enforced, and in that of a parish where it was not. He had gauged the dimensions of Scottish pauperism before the English system was adopted, and after it was adopted ; and his observations of the result led him to denounce the latter as a system tending to manufacture and to perpetuate the evil it was supposed to cure.

These remarks are intended to bear upon the tendency discovered in this colony to throw the burden of relieving the necessitous population upon the Government. On consulting the reports published by the various benevolent institutions, we find general complaints of a disposition on the part of individuals to shirk their responsibility, and such evidence of the fact as will render the compulsory system with all its attendant evils a necessity. . . .

There are some examples of what damage may be done to the morals of a people by the collection of a large fund specifically for the relief of indigence. The glare of this gilded vision blinds thousands of people to the virtues of personal industry. They are diverted from purposes of honest independence ; and, assuming the spirit and dress of paupers, bequeath both, together with the poison they imply, to their posterity. So, year by year, the industrious are taxed to satisfy the insatiable greed of a depraved community, who, with the license of custom, demand as a right what should be conferred as an alms. The suburb parish of Glasgow, known as the Barony, contained in 1810 a manufacturing population of 50,000. Previous to that date, when no compulsory assessment of property existed for the support of the poor, the expenditure seldom exceeded £600 annually. During the seven years which succeeded 1810, when the compulsory system was introduced, the expenditure increased to £3000. As the Scottish system has approximated to that of England, the demand for relief has not only equalled, but far exceeded, that of England. It is instructive to contrast the 7d. per head on the entire population of a large parish entrusted to Dr. CHALMERS for experimental purposes, which represented the expenditure incurred in the relief of distress, with the 5s. 1½d. per head, on the three millions of Scotland, now required to aliment the indigent.

The case of England is somewhat peculiar. The annual payment of about 1s. 6d. per head on the entire population for the same purpose is there regarded by some persons—though not by men accustomed to think lucidly upon political subjects—as a backhanded compensation to the poor man for having been disinherited of his share in the land of the country. Be that as it may, in this newly-settled colony no such reason can exist. Here, where an effective desire for accumulation co-exists with a boundless extent of unoccupied land, and the growth of capital easily keeps pace with the utmost possible increase of population, there can be little need of any provision for indigence beyond that which private charity is able to provide. The subjects of mental and bodily diseases may safely be left to the provisions of legal charity, which will not add to their number; but unless it is thought desirable to fix pauperism by hereditary settlement in Australian families, we shall afford no sanction to a legal claim to relief by the establishment of a full-blown Poor Law system ; but shall, by means of present organisations, possibly somewhat modified, continue to relieve distress, carefully discriminating between indigence associated with crime and that arising from no criminal causes, while ever mindful to support, but in no way to disturb, the delicate machinery of that law which binds parent to child, and child to parent, and friend to friend, in the bonds of mutual helpfulness.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Wednesday 8 May 1867, page 4