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