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.