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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ANTI-PAUPERISM 763 268. The poor law system, as administered during the first A&P, 1706 quarter of the nineteenth century, was not the least of the evils of the time. It was terribly costly in money® and threatened to bring utter ruin on some of the rural districts?, while the burden of maintaining the system pressed very heavily on men who were little able to bear it. The methods of relief? The adopted were demoralising. Sometimes assistance was given for for to the able-bodied poor in the form of food, or of fuel; more a frequently they were enabled to obtain house-room on favour- able terms, either by exemption from the rates’, or grants towards the payment of rent’. There were also various 1 The average charge in 1748, 49, 50 had been £689,971 yearly. In 1776 the whole sum raised expended on the poor was £1,556,804; on the average of the years 1783, 1784, 1785, the sum expended on the poor was £2,004.238; in 1803 the sum expended on the poor was £4,267,965; in 1815 the sum expended on the poor amounted to £5,072,028. Report from the Select Committee on Poor Laws (1817), VL. b, also App. C, Reports, 1821, Iv. 277. t The inhabitants of the parish of Wombridge in Salop stated that “the annual value of the lands, mines and houses in this parish is not sufficient to maintain the aumerous and increasing poor, even if the same were to be set free of rent.” Report from the Select Committee on the Poor Laws (1817), vi. 158, App. D. } Mackay, Public Relief of Poor, pp. 52, 58—68. 4 Report, 1834, xxvii. p. 9. The evidence in regard to S. Clement's, Oxford, is interesting. * The rents are, in fact, levied to a considerable degree upon those who pay rates. In the first place, by the abstraction of so much property from rateable wealth, the remainder has to bear a heavier burden ; secondly, the rents are carried to as great a height as possible, upon the supposition that tenements so circumstanced will not be rated; the owner, therefore, is pocketing both rate and rent; and thirdly, the value of his property is increased precisely in pro- portion that his neighbour's is deteriorated, by the weight of rates from which his own is discharged. Neither is this all; as it is always regarded by the tenant as a desirable thing to escape the payment of rates, the field for competition is narrowed, and a very inferior description of house is built for the poor man. In order to make out a case for the non-payment of rates, it is necessary to have inconveniences and defects; and thus it happens that a building speculation, depending upon freedom from rates for its recommendation, always produces a description of houses of the worst and most unhealthy kind. Those who would build for the poor with more liberal views, and greater attention to their health and their comfort, are discouraged, and a monopoly is given to those whose sole end is gain, by whatever means it may be compassed.” 5 Report, 1834, xxvir. p. 9. “The payment of rent out of the rates is nearly aniversal; in many parishes it is extended to nearly all the married labourers. In Llanidloes out of £2,000 spent on the poor, nearly £800, and in Bodedern out of £360, £113, are thus exhausted. In Anglesea and part of Caernarvonshire, over- seers frequently give written guarantees, making the parish responsible for the rent of cottages let to the Poor....Paupers have thus become a very desirable rlass of tenants, much preferable, as was admitted by several cottage proprietors, to the independent labourers, whose rent at the same time this mode of relief enhances. Of this I received much testimony: amongst others. an overseer of

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