assumed  willingly and shared in fair
proportion among all men who have ability to
bear them.

The vice-chairman of the Witham Union
mentioned a friend of his in Cambridge, who
having a quantity of land in one parish and a
strip in a parish adjoining, had pulled down his
cottages on his large estate and rebuilt them
on his small one, so that his labourers might
be removed out of the place in which he would
himself have to contribute much to their
relief in seasons of distress, to a parish to which
his contributions were nominal. " In the
Stowmarket Union," writes a resident
landowner, " I know a parish owned by one man
requiring forty or fifty labourers; it contains
cottages only for six or seven. The adjoining
parishes bear this landowner's burdens." A
guardian of the Woodbridge Union mentioned
that on his way to the Board he had passed
through one street in Woodbridge, containing
twenty-five cottages, seventeen of which were
occupied by families not working in the place
or belonging to it, but chargeable in case of
sickness or accident, or by five years' residence.
He spoke also of a parish of Boulge, all of
whose paupers would be chargeable to Wood-
bridge in event of illness, there being only
two cottages in Boulge, although it is a
parish yielding the same rental as Little
Bealings, in which there are more than three
hundred inhabitants.

These scattered facts are of a kind not to
be misunderstood; but we add more. After
a tour of inspection in Dorsetshire,
Hampshire and Somersetshire, Mr. Revans reported
to the Poor Law Board that " a perpetual
surveillance in small town parishes is now
kept over the working-classes by the
ratepayers to prevent the former becoming
irremovable. The moment it is supposed that a
labouring man is likely to complete a residence
of five years, every endeavour is made to
induce him to reside out of the parish, even
for a short time. He is offered a residence
rent-free, in another parish, for a short period,
and if this or some other stratagem is not
sufficient, the ratepayers apply to his landlord,
by whom he is induced to go elsewhere, whilst
his dwelling or his lodging is repaired,
whitewashed and painted, or he has permanent
notice to quit his dwelling, the rest of the
ratepayers refusing him a lodging during
the short period requisite to break the
continuous five years." As a last instance we
may quote the case of a gentleman at Maple
Durham who brought an action against a
tenant occupying a mill on his estate to
recover two penalties of fifty pounds each for
having, contrary to a clause in the lease, made
two parishioners by lodging labourers who
had been brought from other parishes.
This case was mentioned by Mr. Chadwick
before a select Committee of the House of
Commons.

Where parishes do not belong to a few
owners, and it is impossible to make them
close, they contain a certain number of
labourers who have a settlement; and who,
when not supplied with work by the
parishioners, must be maintained out of the
local rates. In that case it is the object of
the ratepayers to give all their work to these
people, and the farmer who employs strangers,
or fails to employ a full complement of
parish labourers is considered by his watchful
neighbours to be acting like a pickpocket.
The labourers abstain from straying into
other parishes wherein they will be looked
upon as locusts: they maintain their settlement
at home, and know quite well that if
Farmer Jones can find no work for them,
Farmer Smith will, or Farmer Brown must;
or else Farmers Brown, Smith, and Jones
must contribute jointly to their maintenance.
They are set to waste-work very often to keep
them off the rates; and, having no spur to
exertion, work listlessly with their jackets on;
for, of course, a minimum of wages. A
Buckinghamshire farmer stated before a
committee of the House of Lords, when speaking
of those of his men who had been enticed
away for a time to active labour upon railway
works, " Men of that description working
against my own men, as parish men, would
do a day's work by twelve o'clock, and take
their spade on their shoulder and go home;
and they would have done as good a day's
work as my ordinary labourers do." The
parish labourer has not a motive to exertion;
and the farmer thinks that he has no interest
in urging him to rapid movements, since it
appears better that he should spread his work
over a long time than be idle for a day and &
burthen to the local rates. Low-priced labour
is, in fact, woefully dear. A market-gardener
near Leicester made an exceedingly large
fortune. It was an aphorism with him that " he
could not live by poor two-shilling men, he
must have half-crowners." His sons carried on
the farms on the same principle. One of
them said, emphatically, " We will not look
at those poor two-shilling devils, we cannot
thrive upon their labour." Mr. Josiah
Parkes, conducting agricultural drainage
works in Somersetshire, said that he could
not get on at all with the nine and ten shilling
labouring men, until he got them to earn half
as much again by piece-work; then they
became capital workmen. The owner of a
farm in Middlesex of five hundred acres
worked it with parish labourers at eighteen-
pence a day and a pint of porter. He failed.
His successor worked it as a potato farm and
paid for piece-work. Some of his best hands
earned twenty and twenty-four shillings a
week, and lie himself made out of the farm
before he died two thousand a year. A man
in the Lothians wished to come further south
for his health. He went into Hertfordshire
and Wiltshire. He desired to embark fifteen
or twenty thousand pounds in farming, but
when he saw the value of the parish workmen,
and found how he was beset by difficulties if