2. No man in England, of sound limbs and senses, can be poor merely for want of work.
3. All our workhouses, corporations and charities for employing the poor, and setting them to work, as now they are employed, or any Acts of Parliament, to empower overseers of parishes, or parishes themselves, to employ the poor, except as shall be hereafter excepted, are, and will be public nuisances, mischiefs to the nation which serve to the ruin of families and the increase of the poor.
4. That it is a regulation of the poor that is wanted in England, not a setting them to work.
The poverty and exigence of the poor in England is plainly derived from one of these two particular causes,
Casualty or Crime.
By Casualty, I mean sickness of families, loss of limbs or sight, and any, either natural or accidental, impotence as to labour.
The crimes of our people, and from whence their poverty derives, as the visible and direct fountains are:
This is so apparent in every place, that I think it needs no explication; that English labouring people eat and drink, but especially the latter, three times as much in value as any sort of foreigners of the same dimensions in the world.