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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768 A.D. 1778 before the Civil War had ceased to be effective. Here and there exceptional men devoted themselves to grappling with the difficulties of the task in the early part of the nineteenth century, and the poor relief in their localities was admirably managed ; but there were no means of bringing the practice in other places up to this standard. Throughout the country generally the local authorities, whether parochial overseers or county justices, varied between a policy of extreme severity Jettier he and one of unwise laxity. The duty of the overseers, as they had for the most part understood and acted upon it, had been that of defending the parish against the establishment of new claims upon it, and of relieving the poor without any unnecessary cost. The tradition of the office had been one of harshness; this is the impression conveyed by Dr Burns’ pungent sentences in 1764. “The office of an overseer seems to be understood to be this: to keep an extraordinary look- out to prevent persons coming to inhabit without certificates, and to fly to the justices to remove them; and if a man brings a certificate, then to caution all the inhabitants not to let him a farm of £10 a year, and to take care to keep him out of all parish offices; to warn them, if they will hire servants, to hire them half-yearly,......or, if they do hire them for a year, then to endeavour to pick a quarrel with them before the year’s end, and so to get rid of them. To bind out poor children apprentices, no matter to whom, or to what trade, but to take especial care that the master live in another parish’.” It does not appear that there had been any marked improvement in the intervening period®. Certainly in those LAISSEZ FAIRE 1 Burn, History of Poor Law, 211. 2 See Gilbert, Considerations on the Bills for the Better Relief and Employ- ment of the Poor (1787), p. 11. Also the statement in 1834: “As a body [ found annual overseers wholly incompetent to discharge the duties of their office, either from the interference of private occupations, or from a want of experience and skill; but most frequently from both these causes, their object is to get through the year with as little unpopularity and trouble as possible, their successors therefore have frequently to complain of demands left unsettled and rates uncollected, either from carelessness or a desire to gain the trifling popularity of having called for fewer assessments than usual. In rural districts the overseers are farmers; in towns generally shopkeepers; and in villages usually one of each of those classes. The superiority of salaried assistant-over- seers is admitted wherever they exist, and in nearly all the instances where a select vestry has fallen into desuetude, the assistant-overseer has been retained. vr short so bad is the annual system considered. that an enactment was frequently

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