Statement of the Provision for the Poor, and of the Condition of the Labouring Classes in a Considerable Portion of America and Europe / Being the preface to the foreign communications contained in the appendix to the Poor-Law Report

by Nassau William Senior

SAXONY.

But little information has been received from Saxony.

Some of the modes in which relief is administered appear, as they are nakedly stated in the Report, to be liable to great abuse. We are told that persons receive from the parishes to which they belong assistance in proportion to their inability to maintain themselves; that a sum is fixed as necessary to support a man, and that if he cannot earn the whole, the difference is given to him as relief; and that with respect to lodging, the parish interferes in cases where ejectment takes place on account of non-payment of house-rent, and guarantees payment for a short time to those who agree to receive the houseless (p. 479). These customs, as they are mentioned, resemble the worst forms of English mal-administration,—allowance and payment of rent.

Mr. Forbes, however, states that more relief than is strictly necessary is never given; and that it has been the steady determination of every government to render the situation of those receiving parochial relief too irksome for it to proceed from any other than the merest necessity. It is probable, therefore, that a strict administration prevents the customs which have been mentioned from being sufficiently prevalent to produce what have been their consequences with us.

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