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of a common stock , from which they endeavour by all sorts of fraudulent contrivances to draw as much , and to contribute to it by their labour as little , as their ingenuity and good luck enable them . To arrest this demoralization , before the labouring T > or > ulation To arrest this demoralizationbefore the labouring population
, shall be entirely corrupted , and the whole produce of the country swallowed up by the poor rates , is the object of the Commissioners ; and they have been able to imagine no means but one ; nor ( as must be evident ) are any others possible . The condition of a pauper must cease to be , as it has been made , an object of desire and envy to the independent labourer . Relief must be
given ; no one must be allowed to starve ; the necessaries of life and health must be tendered to all who apply for them ; but to all who are capable of work they must be tendered on such terms , as shall make the necessity of accepting them be regarded as a misfortune ; and shall induce the labourer to apply for them only when he cannot help it , and to take the first opportunity of again
shifting for himself . To this end , relief must be given only in exchange for labour , and labour at least as irksome and severe as that of the least fortunate among the independent labourers : relief , moreover , must be confined to necessaries . Indulgences , even those which happily the very poorest class of labourers , when in full employment , are able occasionally to allow themselves , must be rigidly withheld .
These objects the Commissioners seek to accomplish , by granting " relief to the able-bodied ( as a general rule ) only within the workhouse ; relief at their own houses being an exception , never to be made but upon special grounds . The reason assigned for this , and borne out by the evidence , is , that anywhere but in a workhouse it is quite impossible to make pauper labour efficient . Parish work , as at present conducted , is notoriously , universally , and by the necessity of the case , very much the same thing as total idleness . Even when set to work on the roads , a kind of labour
susceptible of more easy and efficient superintendence than most others , it is found impracticable to exact from the paupers much more than nominal work . In the workhouse alone can the life of a pauper , consistently with an ample supply of necessaries , be rendered other than enviable , as compared with the hard labour
and poor fare of those who find their own subsistence . Yet against this fundamental principle of all Poor Law Reform have the ' Times' and other papers raised the cry of inhumanity . They call it treating poverty as a crime . It is but making pauperism no longer a piece of good fortune .
The spirit manifested by the newspapers is exactly similar to that which the Commissioners say they have met with in almost all the parties to whom they addressed their printed queries . They found every where the bitterest complaints of the present system , the most alarming predictions of universal ruin if
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R eform of the Poor Laws . 361
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No . 89 . 2 C
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 361, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/49/
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