es
and beggars. A life of dependence becomes easier though it need not
necessarily be adopted. Whatever may have been the relation of the two
phenomena, the social revolution made the old social arrangements more
inadequate. Great aggregations of workmen were formed in towns, which
were still only villages in a legal sense. Fluctuations of trade, due to
war or speculation, brought distress to the improvident; and the old
assumption that every man had a proper place in a small circle, where
his neighbours knew all about him, was further than ever from being
verified. One painful result was already beginning to show itself.
Neglected children in great towns had already excited compassion. Thomas
Coram (1668?-1751) had been shocked by the sight of dying children
exposed in the streets of London, and succeeded in establishing the
Foundling Hospital (founded in 1742). In 1762, Jonas Hanway (1712-1786)
obtained a law for boarding out children born within the bills of
mortality. The demand for children's labour, produced by the factories,
seemed naturally enough to offer a better chance for extending such
charities. Unfortunately among the people who took advantage of it were
parish officials, eager to get children off their hands, and
manufacturers concerned only to make money out of childish labour.
Hence arose the shameful system for which remedies (as I shall have to
notice) had to be sought in a later generation.

Meanwhile the outbreak of the revolutionary war had made the question
urgent. When Manchester trade suffered, as Eden tells us in his reports,
many workmen enlisted in the army, and left their children to be
supported by the parish. Bad seasons followed in 1794 and 1795, and
there was great distress in the agricultural districts. The governing
classes became alarmed. In December 1795 Whitbread introduced a bill
providing that the justices of the peace should fix a minimum rate of
wages. Upon a motion for the second reading, Pitt made the famous speech
(12th December) including the often-quoted statement that when a man had
a family, relief should be 'a matter of right and honour, instead of a
ground of opprobrium and contempt.'[87] Pitt had in the same speech
shown his reading of Adam Smith by dwelling upon the general objections
to state interference with wages, and had argued that more was to be
gained by removing the restrictions upon the free movement of labour. He
undertook to produce a comprehensive measur