374 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM 
A.D. 1689 
—1776. 
were tried 
in many 
towns. 
The estab- 
lishment 
1705, but no general Act was passed: though an important 
experiment was tried in Bristol}, and the different parishes 
in the city were incorporated and proceeded to erect a 
workhouse for employing their poor. The Bristol scheme 
appears to have been carried through by Mr Cary, who was 
then a well-known writer on commercial subjects; within a 
very few years the example, which had been set at Bristol, 
was followed at Exeter, Hereford, Colchester, Hull, Shaftes- 
bury, Lynn, Sudbury, Gloucester, Plymouth, and Norwich? 
The Bristol experiment was not, however, a pecuniary success; 
and in 1714 the Corporation found themselves in great 
difficulties, as they had entirely lost the fund with which 
they had started. 
As a matter of fact, it was extremely difficult to organise 
an undertaking of this kind in such a manner that it should 
be a commercial success. This had not been easy, even in 
the Elizabethan period ; but the more industrial organisation 
and industrial skill developed, the more difficult must it have 
been to set the casual and untrained poor on remunerative 
work. According to Defoe® the whole attempt was illusory, 
and could only result in diverting occupation from the frugal 
and industrious who were employed in the ordinary course 
of trade, and subsidising the lazy and inefficient. His 
criticism sufficed to kill the magnificent scheme of that 
ingenious projector Sir Humphry Mackworth, whose Bill for 
establishing a factory in every parish, after being passed by 
the House of Commons, was dropped in the House of 
Lords. But the advocates of providing employment were 
not daunted: a much humbler plan of a similar kind® was 
1 John Cary, An Account of the Proceedings of the Corporation of Bristol 
:1700). The children could not spin woollen yarn so as to pay for their own keep 
til they learned to spin it specially fine, p. 13. 3 Eden, 1. 257. 
8 Giving Alms no Charity, in Genuine Works, It. 435. ‘ 
i TL. Braddon, Particular Answers to the most Material Objections made to the 
proposal...for Relieving, Reforming and Employing the Poor of Great Britain 
(1722). Brit. Mus. 1027. i. 18 (7). 
6 A mass of very interesting information on the workhouses in England, their 
history and management, will be found in An account of several workhouses for 
employing and maintaining the poor (1725), Brit. Mus. 1027. i. 18 (9). It appears 
that there were about 124 workhouses known to the writer in different parishes in 
England at this date. The distribution is very curious. They were mostly con- 
centrated in Essex, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Bucks. and Bedfordshire—