is in jail for having, by cruel usage, slain in
the workhouse a child of three years old; the
mother, who was in the same workhouse, being
condemned as refractory by the authorities for
clamouring to come at, and be the helper of,
her child. Not long ago, a mother and her little
one being received in a workhouse, the mother
pleaded for leave to be the child's nurse, because
it was very troublesome, and nobody but she
was likely to be patient with it. This law of
God being against poor-law system, the mother
and child were parted, and the child was given
to a workhouse nurse—by whose cruelty it was
killed for its provocations of her temper.

Again, provident habits, we are told, should
be encouraged. Poor-rate relief joins issue with
this principle. The labourer who shall have
saved a small sum, or who occupies a couple
of roods of land, when past work by illness or
decrepitude of age, must first spend all to the
last farthing, and give up his little tenancy,
before he can be eligible for a relief given in far
less degree to the respectable distressed poor
than to the idle destitute and sick.

Surely some harm comes of the trampling
upon conjugal and parental feelings, the
weakening of that desire for self-support which
is one of the best stimulants of industry, the
substitution for that feeling of interdependence
which should exist between rich and poor, of
habits of dependence by the poor upon the rich.
If they are out of work, whether from some
casualty (and it is singular how many casualties
befal the idle) or from misconduct, the improvident
poor know where to turn for relief, and
how to make the best bargain with the officer or
the board. This ready resource makes them feel
independent of the world. They therefore
contract marriage without taking thought how to
maintain a wife, and this, too, at an age when
few of the other labouring or professional classes
can afford to marry. Old age, on the other hand,
needs no provision, for there are the gentry, the
charities, the clergymen; and the poor-law,
which protects them against absolute starvation,
will even defray the cost of the pauper's burial.
Does the employer urge his labourer to put aside,
while he is young and hearty, a yearly trifle
to provide for days of age or illness? Does the
clergyman lecture copiously in the schoolroom
on the benefits of the Post-office Savings Bank
just opened in the village, or the Co-operative
Society afloat in the next town, or the County
Benefit Club? Too commonly the reply to his
persuasions is, " Why should I toil for the
future? Why lay by money for an annuity when
I come to be seventy? To save the rate? To
help the parson and the squire? The law
compels them to support me when I can't
support myself. They live by the sweat of our
brow, and when our turn comes, support us
they shall." With such reasoning, many are
satisfied; they act upon it, and frame their plans
in life (so far as they frame any) in accordance
with it. The degradation of pauperism is a
moral degradation, and with such characters
weighs literally nothing.

On the other hand, the true-hearted
industrious farm-labourer, who feels as great a
natural craving for independence as any of
his fellow-countrymen, regards for a while, with
a feeling akin to shame, the prospect of pauper
relief. To secure provision against days of
failing strength, he would toil manfully, but,
alas! to the ancient difficulty of earning bread
enough by his own toil, is added the demand
that he shall earn not less than a competence.
Blessed with health, and in constant
work at good wages, with a prudent
housewife's help, say that he succeeds in rising above
possible need of help from the rate: it is well.
But if, with interrupted health, or fewer
opportunities, or greater pulls upon his means, his
success fall only a little short of securing him
perfect independence, how is it with him then?
The savings of years must vanish altogether
before he can be, from the very nature of the poor-
law eligible for relief. To this argument he is
then tempted: "A provision, at least as respectable
as that which most of my neighbours
require is in store for me, on condition that I am
eligible to claim it. Why debar myself, my
wife and family, from many present comforts on
the mere chance of securing independence?"
Government security for his little savings, and
two and a half per cent per annum in addition,
appears to him a mere snare and delusion. It
is a hundred to one that his savings will be no
real gain to himself, when they constitute him
independent in the eye of the poor-law,—though
God knows how urgent may be his necessities!
The poor-rate is a burden not laid upon him by
law: why should he, by saving money, make of
it a rod for his own back? He therefore
relinquishes all notion of an annuity against old
age, and confines the use of his savings to
another end. He will strive, notwithstanding
grave impediments, to secure provision for the
day of sickness.

Such is the influence exerted over our
peasantry by the system of poor-rate relief. It
does not tend to eradicate the improvidence
of the idle, but directly to encourage it. On
the other hand, it does discourage the
exertions of the industrious poor, when they would
strive for an honourable rest to end their lives
of toil.

And further; can it be maintained that the
present system of pauper relief is a whit more
successful in strengthening the bonds of
sympathy and good feeling which ought to exist
between those who pay, and those who receive the
rate? Is the ratepayer induced by the process
of a continuous and heavy drain on his income,
to regard with a more friendly eye the classes
for whose benefit he is so large an involuntary
subscriber? Is the pauper grateful who
receives the miserable dole? Is not this the
result of it: That the line of demarcation
between rich and poor, instead of being softened
down so as to become imperceptible, becomes
more and more strongly defined? How heavily
such a result bears upon the moral and social
condition of the poor, I say nothing here of the