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Untitled Article
it be persevered in , and the most vehement objection * to the adoption of any remedy . People seemed to expect that evils , which were threatening the subversion of society , should be extirpated without causing the most trifling , the most momentary inconvenience to anybody . The newspapers expect the same thing . They look for ends , and will consent to no means . Thus , the * Times '
assents to the principle that the independent labourer must be better off than the pauper ; and yet accuses the Commissioners of making poverty a crime , for proposing simply this very thing . How , we beg to know , is the independent labourer to be better off
than the pauper , and yet the pauper no worse off than the independent labourer ? If pauperism is to be made undesirable , that may always be called treating it as a crime . Not one hint does the writer in the ' Times' give , of any other means of making pauperism undesirable , but those which the Commissioners
suggest . He must have known that they did not make the suggestion lightly . When men of rare acquirements and talents , with unlimited access to information , have employed more than two years in the most diligent examination and study of the subject in all its bearings—one who doe 3 not pretend to know more of the subject than we all know , is at least bound , if he disputes their conclusion , to be prepared to answer their case .
The Ministry , however , have been so far influenced by these unreasonable objections , as to depart in some degree from the propositions of the Poor Law Report . Th ^ Commissioners proposed , that , after a certain time , say two years , relief to the ablebodied , anywhere but in the workhouse , should , as a general rule , be unlawful ; and , in the mean time , the Central Board were
invested with the power of erecting workhouses , to receive such persons as from choice or necessity should remain paupers after that period . Lord Althorp ' s Bill fixes no time after which outdoor relief is to be prohibited : it gives indeed to the Central Board , the power of prohibiting , or regulating the conditions of , such relief , but not the power to erect workhouses , except with the consent of the parish . On the other hand , the Bill provides
( which the plan of the Commissioners did not ) that the allowance system , i . e . relief in aid of wages , shall cease on the 1 st of June , 1835 . On that day , therefore , a very large proportion of the labouring population will have to make choice , either to go off the parish entirely , or to become , not inmates of a workhouse , for there will perhap 3 be neither workhouses to receive them nor power to
send them thither , but paupers receiving out-door relief . Very few would have made their voluntary election for the former kind of pauperism ; very many , it is to be feared , will have no objection to the latter . The reform which it is hoped to accomplish in the habits of the rural population , will thus be indefinitely retarded ; the difficulty of subsequently abolishing out-door relief , probably much augmented ; and the measure exposed to much local un-
Untitled Article
S 62 Notes on the Newspaper * .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 362, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/50/
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