The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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376 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM system was a great decrease of the rates; but there were difficulties in carrying on such establishments satisfactorily’, and the condition of some of the houses which survived in 1833, where the poor were huddled together without dis- tinction of age or sex, was disgraceful in the extreme? Though the establishment of these institutions did not realise the expectations of their promoters, they served indirectly to check the increase of pauperism. Overseers were empowered in 1723 to refuse relief to persons who -hecked the Would not enter the houses, and there was in consequence ane of a great check upon the growing expenditure on the poor. The decline in the rates during this period is sometimes spoken of as a proof of the flourishing condition of the labourer in the eighteenth century; more probably it merely indicates the increased stringency on the part of the officials. nha This was shown, not merely in the diminution of the charge on cottages. for maintenance, but in the war which was carried on, in many parishes, against cottages. There was a regular crusade against the half-vagrant, half-pauper class that sub- sisted on the commons; and the tendency of the authorities A.D. 1689 —1776. ,nter the workhouse, and the fact is, that what the contractor gives a pauper in ‘he shape of allowance out of the workhouse, is not by a half or a third so much 18 it would cost him, were he to maintain such pauper in it. Hence it is that in the parishes in Monmouthshire yon will find the workhouses almost deserted. Their workhouses or poorhouses seem scarcely to answer any other ends, but ‘hat of terrifying paupers into a willingness to accept the quantum of allowance the contractor may think fit to offer them.” Reports, 1834, xxvIT. 664. 1 Henry Fielding wrote on the subject in 1753 in a Proposal for making an effectual Provision for the Poor. The experience of half a century as to the management of workhouses and the trades which could be carried on in them was summed up by Mr W. Bailey of the Society of Arts in his Treatise on the Better Employment of the Poor (1758). Pennant writing in 1787 speaks with much snthusiasm of the large house of industry in the Isle of Wight, and enumerates ‘he employments. Journey, mw. 156. 3 The Chatham case was particularly bad (Reports, 1834, xxvit. 224), also the management of Preston in Sussex (7%. 539), and in some of the large London parishes the authorities had not sufficient powers to cope with the hardened offenders, Ib. 78. The commissioners reported that in by far the greater number of cases the workhouse * is a large almshouse in which the young are trained in idleness, ignorance and vice; the able-bodied maintained in sluggish sensual indolence; the aged and more respectable exposed to all the misery that is incident to dwelling in such a society, without government or classification, and the whole body of inmates subsisting on food far exceeding both in kind and in amount, not merely the diet of the independent labourer,jbut that of the majority of persons who contribute to their support.” Reports, 1834, xxvir 81.

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