e various
pamphlets upon economical topics; contributed letters signed
'Philanglus' to Cobbett's _Porcupine_, the anti-jacobin paper of the
day; and is described by Bentham[75] as a 'declared disciple' and a
'highly valued friend.' He may be reckoned, therefore, as a Utilitarian,
though politically he was a Conservative. He seems to have been a man of
literary tastes as well as a man of business, and his book is a clear
and able statement of the points at issue.

Eden's attention had been drawn to the subject by the distress which
followed the outbreak of the revolutionary war. He employed an agent who
travelled through the country for a year with a set of queries drawn up
after the model of those prepared by Sinclair for his _Statistical
Account of Scotland_. He thus anticipated the remarkable investigation
made in our own time by Mr. Charles Booth. Eden made personal inquiries
and studied the literature of the subject. He had a precursor in Richard
Burn (1709-1785), whose _History of the Poor-laws_ appeared in 1764, and
a competitor in John Ruggles, whose _History of the Poor_ first appeared
in Arthur Young's _Annals_, and was published as a book in 1793 (second
edition, 1797). Eden's work eclipsed Ruggles's. It has a permanent value
as a collection of facts; and was a sign of the growing sense of the
importance of accurate statistical research. The historian of the social
condition of the people should be grateful to one who broke ground at a
time when the difficulty of obtaining a sound base for social inquiries
began to make itself generally felt. The value of the book for
historical purposes lies beyond my sphere. His first volume, I may say,
gives a history of legislation from the earliest period; and contains
also a valuable account of the voluminous literature which had grown up
during the two preceding centuries. The other two summarise the reports
which he had received. I will only say enough to indicate certain
critical points. Eden's book unfortunately was to mark, not a solution
of the difficulty but, the emergence of a series of problems which were
to increase in complexity and ominous significance through the next
generation.

The general history of the poor-law is sufficiently familiar.[76] The
mediaeval statutes take us to a period at which the labourer was still
regarded as a serf; and a man who had left his village was treated like
a fugitive slave. A long series of statutes regulated the treatment