re merely
giving effect to Gilbert's Act of 1782, which legalized the
supplementing of the wages of able-bodied men from the rates, and the
decision was nicknamed the 'Speenhamland Act' because it was so
generally followed. However well meant, the effect was most
demoralizing and the English labourer, already too prone to look to
the State for help, was induced to depend less on his own exertions.
The real remedy would have been a substantial increase of his scanty
wages. As it was, landowner and farmer were often paying the labourer
in rates money that would far better have come to him in wages, and
the rates in some districts became so burdensome that land was thrown
out of cultivation. In the same year as the Speenhamland Act the
statute 36 Geo. III, c. 23, forbade the removal of persons from any
parish until they were in actual need of support; but although the law
was thus relaxed, the fixed principle which caused the refusal of all
permanent relief to labourers who had no settlement in the parish
acted as a very efficient check on migration, though, as we have seen,
it did not entirely check it. In 1796 the question of regulating the
labourers' wages by Parliament was raised; but Pitt, remembering such
schemes had always failed, was hostile, and the matter dropped.[521]
In the same year Eden made his inquiries concerning the rate of wages
and the cost of living. In Bedford, he found the agricultural labourer
was getting 1s. 2d. a day and beer, with extras in harvest[522]; but
bacon was 10d. a lb. and wheat 12s. a bushel. However, parish
allowances were liberal, a man, his wife, and four children sometimes
receiving 11s. a week from that source.

In Cumberland the labourer was being paid 10d. to 1s. a day with food,
or 1s. 6d. to 1s. 8d. without; in Hertfordshire, 1s. 6d. a day; in
Suffolk, 1s. 4d. a day and beer.

Nearly everywhere his expenditure was much in excess of his earnings,
the yearly budgets of fifty-three families in twelve different
counties showed generally large annual deficiencies, amounting in one
case to L21 18s. 4d. In one case in Lindsey, where the deficiency was
small, the family lived on bread alone. The factory system, too, had
already deprived the labourer of many of his by-industries, and thus
helped the pauperism for which landlord and farmer had to pay in
rates.

About 1788 Sir William Young proposed to send the unemployed labourers
round to the parishioners to get work, their wages b