The fourth Class comprehends the aged and infirm, who are entirely past labour, and have no means of support.—Where an honest industrious man has wasted his strength in labour and endeavours to rear a family, he is well entitled to an asylum to render the evening of his life comfortable. For this class the gratitude and the humanity of the Community ought to provide a retreat separate from the profligate and vagrant Poor. But, alas! the present System admits of no such blessing.—The most deserving most submit to an indiscriminate intercourse in Workhouses with the most worthless: whose polluted language and irregular conduct, render not a few of those asylums as great a punishment to the decent part of the indigent and infirm as a common prison.
The fifth Class comprises the Infant Poor, who from extreme indigence, or the death of parents, are cast upon the public for nurture. One fifth part of the gross number in a London Workhouse is generally composed of this class. Their moral and religious education is of the last importance to the Community. They are the children of the Public, and if not introduced into life, under circumstances favourable to the interest of the State, the error in the System becomes flagrant.—Profligate or distressed parents may educate their children ill; but when those under the charge of Public Institutions are suffered to become depraved in their progress to maturity, it is a dreadful reproach on the Police of the Country.—And yet what is to be expected from children reared in Workhouses, with the evil examples before them of the multitudes of depraved characters who are constantly admitted into those receptacles? Young minds are generally more susceptible of evil than of good impressions; and hence it is that the rising generation enter upon life with those wicked and dangerous propensities, which are visible to the attentive observer in all the walks of vulgar life in this great Metropolis.
The limits of this Treatise will not permit the Author to attempt more than a mere outline on the general subject of the Poor; a System of all others the most difficult to manage and arrange with advantage to the Community; but which is at present unhappily entrusted to the care of those least competent to the task.
The principle of the Statute of the 43d of Elizabeth is certainly unobjectionable; but the execution, it must be repeated, is defective. In short, no part of it has been effectually executed, but that which relates to raising the assessments. It is easy to make Statutes; but omnipotent as Parliament is said to be, it cannot give knowledge, education, public spirit, integrity and time, to those Changeable Agents whom it has charged with the execution of the Poor Laws.
In the management of the affairs of the State, the Sovereign wisely selects men eminent for their talents and integrity:—Were the choice to be made on the principle established by the Poor Laws, the Nation could not exist even a single year.
In the private affairs of life, the success of every difficult undertaking depends on the degree of abilities employed in the management. In the affairs of the Poor, the most arduous and intricate that it is possible to conceive, and where the greatest talents and knowledge is required, the least portion of either is supplied. How then can we expect success?—The error is not in the original design, which is wise and judicious. The 43d of Elizabeth authorizes an assessment to be made for three purposes.
1st. To purchase Raw Materials to set the Poor to work, who could not otherwise dispose of their labour.
2d. To usher into the world, advantageously, the Children of poor people, by binding them apprentices to some useful employment.
3d. To provide for the lame, impotent and blind, and others, being poor and not able to work.
Nothing can be better imagined than the measures in the view of the very able framers of this act: but they did not discover that to execute such a design required powers diametrically opposite to those which the law provided. The last two centuries have afforded a series of proof of the total inefficacy of the application of these powers, not only by the effects which this erroneous superintendence has produced; but also from the testimony of the most enlightened men who have written on the subject, from the venerable Lord Hale to the patriotic and indefatigable Sir Frederick Eden. But the strongest evidence of the mischiefs arising from this defective execution of a valuable System, is to be found in the Statute Books themselves.[96]