566 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM
the standard of comfort was low, and the labourer was
generally speaking in a position to satisfy his requirements
hat Shey without strenuous exertion’, Under these circumstances we
OU . .
ford to can hardly be surprised at the repeated charges of idleness
be idle : . . s
which are brought against the poor; this was a constant
complaint on the part of the employers? and was pub
forward by many writers as the real cause of lack of
employment and poverty®.
On this assumption, that idleness was the only cause of
sauperism (apart from sickness and old age), it was obvious
jhat additional opportunities of employment would have
iittle effect on those who were unwilling to work at all.
It may perhaps be said that the hard tone, which popular
opinion associates with the dismal science, first shows itself
at a period, when philanthropic measures were denounced
on economic grounds, as either useless¢ or baneful, and when
lispute, a worthy object of our commiseration and assistance” (Essays om
Husbandry, 205).
1 The rural labourer could count on regular employment, since agricultural
industry was not liable to such violent fluctuations as manufacturing (A. Young,
Farmer's Letters, 21), especially in trades for which the materials eame from
abroad. The employees of the capitalist farmer were, however * free hands,” to
juote Sir James Steuart’s phrase, as distinguished from peasants whose interest
bound them to the soil.
3 Compare Temple, Vindication of Commerce (1758), p. 18. Also Essay on
Trade and Commerce, Brit. Mus. 1139. i. 4 (1770), p. 15: “The manufacturing
population do not labour above four days a week unless provisions happen to be
very dear.” ‘When provisions are cheap they wont work above half the week
but sot or idle away half their time.” Richardson, Causes of Decline (1750), p. 6.
Even when the men were industrious, the conditions of domestic industry in the
West Riding were such that the men lost about a third of their time. Annals of
dgriculture, xxviL. 511.
8 Locke (Report of Board of Trade [1697] in Account of Society for the
Promotion of Industry in Lindsey, p. 108 [Brit. Mus. 103. 1. 56). Defoe is
perhaps the writer who lays most stress on the faults of the poor: “I make no
Difficulty,” he says, ¢ to promise on a short Summons to produce above & Thousand
Families in England, within my particular knowledge, who go in Rags and their
Children wanting Bread, whose Fathers can earn their fifteen to twenty-five
shillings per week but will not work, who may have Work enough but are too
idle to seek after it, and bardly vouchsafe to earn anything but bare Subsistence
and Spending Money for themselves.” Giving Alms no Chanity, in Genuine
Works, m. 448. Eden (1. 244) stated the opinion, that a large proportion of
paupers, besides the regular tramps, were merely lazy, and that the complaint
of want of work was a mere pretence. The high prices of the dear years had
not inoculated the English with the frugality which the Dutch displayed.
4 # Suppose now a workhouse for the employment of poor children sets them to
spinning of worsted. For every skein of worsted these poor children spin there

A.D. 1689
—1776.