to what parish a pauper
belonged--originated in an act of 1662. Eden observes that the short
clause in this short act had brought more profit to the lawyers than
'any other point in the English jurisprudence.'[77] It is said that the
expense of such a litigation before the act of 1834 averaged from
L300,000 to L350,000 a year.[78] Each parish naturally endeavoured to
shift the burthen upon its neighbours; and was protected by laws which
enabled it to resist the immigration of labourers or actually to expel
them when likely to become chargeable. This law is denounced by Adam
Smith[79] as a 'violation of natural liberty and justice.' It was often
harder, he declared, for a poor man to cross the artificial boundaries
of his parish than to cross a mountain ridge or an arm of the sea. There
was, he declared, hardly a poor man in England over forty who had not
been at some time 'cruelly oppressed' by the working of this law. Eden
thinks that Smith had exaggerated the evil: but a law which operated by
preventing a free circulation of labour, and made it hard for a poor man
to seek the best price for his only saleable commodity, was, so far,
opposed to the fundamental principles common to Smith and Eden. The law,
too, might be used oppressively by the niggardly and narrow-minded. The
overseer, as Burn complained,[80] was often a petty tyrant: his aim was
to depopulate his parish; to prevent the poor from obtaining a
settlement; to make the workhouse a terror by placing it under the
management of a bully; and by all kinds of chicanery to keep down the
rates at whatever cost to the comfort and morality of the poor. This
explains the view taken by Arthur Young, and generally accepted at the
period, that the poor-law meant depopulation. Workhouses had been
started in the seventeenth century[81] with the amiable intention of
providing the industrious poor with work. Children might be trained to
industry and the pauper might be made self-supporting. Workhouses were
expected that is, to provide not only work but wages. Defoe, in his
_Giving Alms no Charity_, pointed out the obvious objections to the
workhouse considered as an institution capable of competing with the
ordinary industries. Workhouses, in fact, soon ceased to be profitable.
Their value, however, in supplying a test for destitution was
recognised; and by an act of 1722, parishes were allowed to set up
workhouses, separately or in combination, and to strike off the lists of