Many intelligent and enlightened landowners are well aware of the paramount necessity of a great change in the condition of the agricultural labourer, with respect to his dwelling; and do all they can to amend that condition. Some of them, greatly to their own honour, have endeavoured to impress on the understanding of the legislature the necessity. of providing the labourer with a dwelling near his work, and above all, giving him better cottage accommodation.*

The law of settlement and removal has tended, during the whole period of its existence, to deter the owners of close parishes from building cottages, and has thus deprived the poor, in numberless agricultural parishes, of the possibility of residing near the place in which their labour is employed. Landowners are found who forget, or have not learned, that the ownership of land imposes moral duties, co-extensive with the legal rights which it sanctions. Throughout extensive districts not a union can be found in which the agricultural labourer is not put to great straits, for want of a residence near his work. A journey of two, three, four, or five miles, has to be performed early and late, morning and night, at every season of the year, and in all weathers, that the unhappy biped may aid in tilling the land, to which he performs his daily pilgrimage, while it is only his more fortunate quadruped companions that are housed there.

The interference of the law of settlement, with the proper supply of cottage accommodation for agricultural labourers, is so manifest, and the resulting evils are so great, that some boards of guardians have been led to rest their condemnation of the existing law of settlement mainly on the ground of that interference, and those evils.

In the Ongar Union, the guardians recently came to a unanimous resolution, "that the abolition of the law of settlement and removal would be very beneficial to the deserving labourers, by encouraging the owners of property to build

* Such was the language of Mr. J. E. Denison, himself an owner of close parishes, in the excellent speech which he made on 5th June, 1846, in moving an instruction to a committee of the House of Commons, to provide for the establishment of union settlements. This speech is referred above, p. 286, note t

U

cottages on their estates for the accommodation of their labourers; and that the present law of settlement and removal operates to the injury of the labourers, by limiting the market of their labour, and discouraging the building of cottages, so that the poor are crowded into miserable dwellings, at the sacrifice of health, comfort, and morality." *

It is undoubted and indisputable, that wherever the deficiency of cottage accommodation exists, as it does so generally, it entails a fearful catalogue of calamities on the unhappy labourer and his family. They usually become a subject of traffic to small building speculators, who extort a high rental for a wretched hut; and who profit by the misery and degradation of those among whom all sense of decency is destroyed, while health is injured, and life itself greatly shortened, by their being crowded together, often without any regard to distinction of age or sex.

The last few years have brought forward an imposing array of witnesses, whose voices have been lifted up against the abomination of the wretched places, unfit for human habitation, in which, to the utter destruction of the poor, and the great injury of all other classes of society, pauperism and disease are permitted, and even constrained, to lurk and propagate themselves.

Among the varied objects exposed, at the World's Great Fair of 1851, to the admiration of visitors, none more deserved examination than the model cottages for labourers, placed at the very threshold of the Exhibition by his Royal Highness Prince Albert. Any one who has forced himself to contemplate the mass of social evil which springs from this single source of defective cottage accommodation in England, must look on the Prince's cottages as furnishing, not only conclusive testimony to the qualities, both of head and heart, of the exhibitor, but as a declaration, from the highest quarter, to the wealthy, that they should make some better provision, than they have hitherto done, for the observance of the ordinary decencies of human life, by that great and helpless

* Reports to the Poor Law Board, 1850, p. 45.

class of Her Majesty's subjects, the poor. Nor have examples been wanting among the landowners themselves, of men who are fully alive to, and willing to discharge, all their moral duties to the race of labourers. Such men have addressed their fellow landowners in direct and urgent terms of advice and entreaty on this important subject. Bedfordshire, owing, perhaps, to the excellent example set by the Duke of Bedford, is, as a whole, a little better off, in respect of cottage accommodation for labourers, than many other counties. "From landlords," said the Duke, in an address published nearly three years ago, "it is surely not too much to expect that, while they are building and improving farmhouses, homesteads, and cattle-sheds, they will also build and improve dwellings for their labourers, in sufficient numbers to meet the improved and improving condition of the land.”* How much remains to be done, even in Bedfordshire, before this excellent advice will have been properly acted on, we shall see in the course of this chapter.

Unexceptionable witnesses have proved, conclusively, how widely spread, and fearful, are the evils engendered among the whole labouring population, in agricultural districts, by this want of decent and convenient cottages. Perhaps the most striking testimony on the subject is that given by the Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners, who had to report, in 1843, on the employment of women and children in agriculture. The Commissioners were told to direct their main attention to the employment of children; and the question of the want of cottage accommodation for the labouring classes seems, in the course of their inquiry, to have forced itself, unasked after, on their attention. The following are passages from their Reports. "The want of sufficient accommodation," says Mr. Austin, "seems universal. Cottages generally have only two bedrooms (with very rare exceptions); a great many have only one. The consequence is, that it is very often extremely difficult, if not impossible, to divide a family so that grown-up persons of different sexes, brothers

* Duke of Bedford, Letter, dated 9th March, 1849, published in the “Journal of the Royal Society of Agriculture," vol. x. pp. 185-187.

legal result of the two appeals, therefore, is, that of these three parishes, the innocent parish, as it is called, the only one parish in which admittedly the pauper is not settled, is to maintain him, and can never remove him again to either of the two parishes, in one or the other of which, admittedly, the pauper is settled.

But it would exhaust my reader's patience, and waste his time, further to dwell on such minute details. There now exist throughout England great grievances, equally suffered by those who pay relief to the poor, and by those who receive it. Such grievances will be discussed in subsequent pages; will probably be found to spread over a wide field for comprehensive legislation; and will at least require a total repeal of the law of settlement and removal.

CHAP. XII.

THE PAUPER LEGISLATION OF THE YEAR 1834.

Regemque dedit, qui fœdere certo

Et premere, et laxas sciret dare jussus habenas.

VIRGIL.

THE Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, is, and will ever remain, a most important step in the history of the pauperism and poor laws of England. Nevertheless, it was little more than an improvement in administrative machinery, and merely provided means of ensuring a due performance of that duty of relieving the poor, the neglect of which had been attended by great injury to all classes of the community. Parliament did little to cut away the root of those evils, which were glaring and admitted, and which no merely administrative change could remove. The most valuable part of the Report of the Commissioners is, perhaps, that which was least attended to by Parliament, and which shows the evils produced by the law of settlement and removal.

It is greatly to be regretted that the Poor Law Amendment Act did not adopt the judicious recommendation of the Commissioners in respect of an extensive reform of that law. The Report had stated the opinion of the Commissioners, that (subject to the obvious exception of persons born in prisons, hospitals, and workhouses,) the settlement of every legitimate child, born after the passing of the intended act, should follow that of the parents or surviving parent of such child, until such child should attain the age of sixteen years, or the death of its surviving parent, and that, at the age of sixteen, or on the death of its surviving parent, such child should be considered as settled in the place in which it was born.* This advice, if adopted, would have been a great simplifying of the

* Report, folio edition, p. 193.