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