f their total debts to about half a
million sterling, from 312,000l. in 1874.

In this respect it is certainly significant to discover that Poor
Relief, organized by a law passed in 1863, is the largest item of
communal expenditure, being indeed very little less than half of the
total annual liabilities of the rural districts, in a country in which,
in the halcyon days of Mr. Laing, only the infirm were supported for a
few days at a time by the yeomen farmers. He appears to have attributed
this to the absence of collieries, the introduction of coal as fuel
having, he argues, been coeval in England with the imposition of a rate
for the poor, deprived by that industry of the work of chopping up
firewood which gave so much employment to idle hands in Norway. However
that might be, in 1880 and 1881 the number of persons in receipt of
relief or maintained in hospital, at the charge of rural communities
alone, was respectively 109,688 and about 114,000, or in both years a
little over 7 per cent. of the total rural population. Inclusive of
urban districts the same totals amounted in those years to 81 and 83 per
1000, or above 8 per cent. of the population of the kingdom, the cost of
support having been about 3s. 10d. per head of the entire population,
which contributed 2s. 9d. per head in special taxation for that object,
and the balance in an indirect manner, apparently by housing paupers,
&c.

These paupers include cotters and labourers, as well as the ruined among
the smaller yeomen. Farmers who had previously been able to employ
labour, 'no longer find their advantage in it,' and consequently--

'even able-bodied workmen (in Hedemarken) were compelled to
seek relief from the Poor Fund when their families were
large. The smaller farmers and the labourers are in the
worst plight, since the falling off in the timber trade has
made them feel the want of the usual steady demand for
labour at high wages.' Further: 'it has become very
difficult for the least affluent and for labourers to gain a
livelihood in the prevailing money and timber crisis.... The
depression must for a long time be felt by many.

We need only point out that, in the United Kingdom, the percentage of
persons in receipt of relief during the year 1881 was 3 per cent. in
England and Wales, 2.6 per cent. in Scotland, and 11 per cent. in
Ireland,[20] involving an expenditure at the rate respectively of 6s.
3d., 4s