The proposals under the first head provided that settlement might be gained by five years’ residence as a householder, if the householder had not become chargeable or been convicted of crime, or been absent for more than six weeks in a year. Two Justices of the Peace were to have power on complaint of the parish authorities to adjudicate on the settlement of any person likely to become chargeable, subject to an appeal to Quarter Sessions.
The proposals under the second head aimed partly at vestry reform and partly at rating reform. In those parishes where there was an open vestry, all ratepayers were still equal as voters, but Whitbread proposed to give extra voting power at vestry meetings in proportion to assessment.[331] He wished to reform rating, by making stock in trade and personal property (except farming stock), which produced profit liable to assessment, by authorising the vestry to exempt such occupiers of cottages as they should think fit, and by giving power to the Justices of the Peace to strike out of the rate any person occupying a cottage not exceeding five pounds in yearly value, who should make application to them, such exemptions not to be considered parochial relief. He also proposed that the county rate should be charged in every parish in proportion to the assessed property in the parish, and that any parish whose poor rate was for three years more than double the average of the parish rate in the county, should have power to apply to Quarter Sessions for relief out of county stock.
Whitbread’s proposals for stimulating thrift and penalising idleness were a strange medley of enlightenment and childishness. He proposed to give the parish officers power to build cottages which were to be let at the best rents that were to be obtained: but the parish officers might with the consent of the vestry allow persons who could not pay rent to occupy them rent free, or at a reduced rent. He proposed also to create a National Bank, something of the nature of a Post Office Savings Bank, to be employed both as a savings bank and an insurance system for the poor. With these two excellent schemes he combined a ridiculous system of prizes and punishments for the thrifty and the irresponsible. Magistrates were to be empowered to give rewards (up to a maximum of £20) with a badge of good conduct, to labourers who had brought up large families without parish help, and to punish any man who appeared to have become chargeable from idleness or misconduct, and to brand him with the words, ‘criminal Poor.’
In his unemployment policy Whitbread committed the fatal mistake, common to almost all the proposals of the time, of mixing up poor relief with wages in a way to depress and demoralise the labour market. The able-bodied unemployed, men, youths, or single women, were to be hired out by parish officers at the best price to be obtained. The wages were to be paid to the worker. If the worker was a single man or woman, or a widower with no children dependent on him, his or her earnings were to be made up by the parish to a sum necessary to his or her subsistence. If he or she had children, they were to be made up to three-quarters, or four-fifths, or the full average rate, according to the number of children. No single man or woman was to be hired out for more than a year, and no man or woman with dependent children for more than a month.
The proposals were attacked vigorously by two critics who were not often found in company, Cobbett and Malthus. Cobbett criticised the introduction of plural voting at vestry meetings in an excellent passage in the Political Register.[332] ‘Many of those who pay rates are but a step or two from pauperism themselves; and they are the most likely persons to consider duly the important duty of doing, in case of relief, what they would be done unto. “But,” Mr. Whitbread will say, “is it right for these persons to give away the money of others.” It is not the money of others, any more than the amount of tithes is the farmer’s money. The maintenance of the poor is a charge upon the land, a charge duly considered in every purchase and in every lease. Besides, as the law now stands, though every parishioner has a vote in vestry, must it not be evident, to every man who reflects, that a man of large property and superior understanding will have weight in proportion? That he will, in fact, have many votes? If he play the tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and it is right they should have the power of so doing; but, while he conducts himself with moderation and humanity, while he behaves as he ought to do to those who are beneath him in point of property, there is no fear but he will have a sufficiency of weight at every vestry. The votes of the inferior persons in the parish are, in reality, dormant, unless in cases where some innovation, or some act of tyranny, is attempted. They are, like the sting of the bee, weapons merely of defence.’
Malthus’ criticisms were of a very different nature.[333] He objected particularly to the public building of cottages, and the assessment of personal property to the rates. He argued that the scarcity of houses was the chief reason ‘why the Poor Laws had not been so extensive and prejudicial in their effects as might have been expected.’ If a stimulus was given to the building of cottages there would be no check on the increase of population. A similar tendency he ascribed to the rating of personal property. The employers of labour had an interest in the increase of population, and therefore in the building of cottages. This instinct was at present held in check by consideration of the burden of the rates. If, however, they could distribute that burden more widely, this consideration would have much less weight. Population would increase and wages would consequently go down. ‘It has been observed by Dr. Adam Smith that no efforts of the legislature had been able to raise the salary of curates to that price which seemed necessary for their decent maintenance: and the reason which he justly assigns is that the bounties held out to the profession by the scholarships and fellowships of the universities always occasioned a redundant supply. In the same manner, if a more than usual supply of labour were encouraged by the premiums of small tenements, nothing could prevent a great and general fall in its price.’
The Bill was introduced in 1807, before the fall of the Whig Ministry, and it went to a Committee. But the Tory Parliament elected that year to support Portland and his anti-Catholic Government was unfriendly, and the county magistrates to whom the draft of the Bill was sent for criticisms were also hostile. Whitbread accordingly proceeded no further. At this time the Speenhamland system seemed to be working without serious inconvenience, and there was therefore no driving power behind such proposals. But after 1815 the conditions had changed, and the apathy of 1807 had melted away. The ruling class was no longer passive and indifferent about the growth of the Speenhamland system: both Houses of Parliament set inquiries on foot, schemes of emigration were invited and discussed, and measures of Vestry Reform were carried. But the problem was no longer the problem that Whitbread had set out to solve. Whitbread had proposed to increase the share of property in the control of the poor rates, but he had also brought forward a constructive scheme of social improvement. The Vestry Reformers of this period were merely interested in reducing the rates; the rest of Whitbread’s programme was forgotten.
In 1818 an Act[334] was passed which established plural voting in vestries, every ratepayer whose rateable value was £50 and over being allowed a vote for every £25 of rateable property. In the following year an Act[335] was passed which allowed parishes to set up a select vestry, and ordained that in these parishes the overseers should give such relief as was ordered by the Select Vestry, and further allowed the appointment of salaried assistant overseers. These changes affected the administration of the Speenhamland system very considerably: and the salaried overseers made themselves hated in many parishes by the Draconian regime which they introduced. The parish cart, or the cart to which in some parishes men and women who asked for relief were harnessed, was one of the innovations of this period. The administrative methods that were adopted in these parishes are illustrated by a fact mentioned by a clerk to the magistrates in Kent, in October 1880.[336] The writer says that there was a severe overseer at Ash, who had among other applicants for relief an unemployed shepherd, with a wife and five children living at Margate, thirteen miles away. The shepherd was given 9s. a week, but the overseer made him walk to Ash every day except Sunday for his eighteenpence. The shepherd walked his twenty-six miles a day on such food as he could obtain out of his share of the 9s. for nine weeks, and then his strength could hold out no longer. The writer remarked that the shepherd was an industrious and honest man, out of work through no fault of his own. It was by such methods that the salaried overseers tried to break the poor of the habit of asking for relief, and it is not surprising that such methods rankled in the memories of the labourers. In this neighbourhood the writer attributed the fires of 1830 more to this cause than to any other.
These attempts to relieve the ratepayer did nothing to relieve the labourer from the incubus of the system. His plight grew steadily worse. A Committee on Agricultural Wages, of which Lord John Russell was chairman, reported in 1824 that whereas in certain northern counties, where the Speenhamland system had not yet taken root, wages were 12s. to 15s., in the south they varied from 8s. or 9s. a week to 3s. for a single man and 4s. 6d. for a married man.[337] In one part of Kent the lowest wages in one parish were 6d. a day, and in the majority of parishes 1s. a day. The wages of an unmarried man in Buckinghamshire in 1828, according to a clergyman who gave evidence before the Committee of that year on the Poor Laws, were 3s. a week, and the wages of a married man were 6s. a week. In one parish in his neighbourhood the farmers had lately reduced the wages of able-bodied married men to 4s. a week. Thus the Speenhamland system had been effective enough in keeping wages low, but as a means of preserving a minimum livelihood it was breaking down by this time on all sides. We have seen from the history of Merton in Oxfordshire[338] what happened in one parish long before the adversities of agriculture had become acute. It is easy from this case to imagine what happened when the decline in employment and agriculture threw a steadily increasing burden on the system of maintenance from the rates. In some places, as the Commissioners of 1834 reported, the labourers were able by intimidation to keep the system in force, but though parishes did not as a rule dare to abandon or reform the system, they steadily reduced their scale.