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Untitled Article
in return . Whenever money is bestowed , useful service of some kind or other should be required . If there be no profitable employment in the vicinity , the pauper should be located elsewhere . The law of settlement should be very much simplified , if not swept away altogether ; so as to avoid the heavy expenses of removals and litigation . A total stop should be put to the inducements , in some cases amounting to compulsion , by which parochial authorities have so largely and blindly multiplied improvident
marriages . And all this done , as far as law can do it , we should be at the threshold of the great work of bettering the condition of the poor . This is only staying the hand from mischief , before stretching it out for good . The great evils of the condition of the poor would still remain , though we should have ceased to aggravate them by our pernicious nostrums . Those evils would require a series of strong measures , promptly adopted , and vigorously executed . We will specify those which ^ in our
apprehension , are the most essential . 1 . The abolition of the Corn Laws . A starving population with a bread-tax of eight millions per annum , besides its indirect pressure , is as monstrous and as cruel an anomaly as the world has ever seen . This weight should be heaved off forthwith . Let the labourer have food at the cheapest rate at which it can be purchased .
2 . All taxation bearing upon the necessaries and common conveniences of life should be remitted . Taxation is chiefly a premium of insurance upon property , and by property should the premium be paid . The remission should extend not only to articles of clothing , shelter , &c .,, but to whatever presses upon the honest recompense and simple enjoyments of the industrious classes .
3 . All restrictions upon the freedom of labour should be removed , and every facility afforded for its transference from one department to another . There is no such art or mystery about most handicraft operations , but that a man may easily master many others besides that to which he was trained in his boyhood .
There will always be something to which an industrious man may turn his hand . The fluctuations which occur in a great manufacturing and commercial country would be comparatively innocuous , were it not for the requirement of apprenticeship , the interference of corporations , and the combinations of the workmen . Such fluctuations would do much towards their own
rectification . Labour , like water , would find its level . The men thrown out of one occupation would take to others . True , their competition might deteriorate the condition of those previously employed in other departments ; but this would only tend to equalize the pressure . The total amount of changes affecting the condition of the labouring classes would be minimized . 4 . An efficient plan of national instruction is essential . By
Untitled Article
372 Poor Laws and Paupers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1833, page 372, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2616/page/12/
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