f Adam
Smith, he accepts the rather vague doctrine of his master about the
'balance' between labour and capital. If labour exceeds capital, he
says, the labourer must starve 'in spite of all political
regulations.'[92] He therefore looks with disfavour upon the whole
poor-law system. It is too deeply rooted to be abolished, but he thinks
that the amount to be raised should not be permitted to exceed the sum
levied on an average of previous years. The only certain result of
Pitt's measure would be a vast expenditure upon a doubtful experiment:
and one main purpose of his publication was to point out the objections
to the plan. He desires what seemed at that time to be almost hopeless,
a national system of education; but his main doctrine is the wisdom of
reliance upon individual effort. The truth of the maxim '_pas trop
gouverner_,' he says,[93] has never been better illustrated than by the
contrast between friendly societies and the poor-laws. Friendly
societies had been known, though they were still on a humble scale, from
the beginning of the century, and had tended to diminish pauperism in
spite of the poor-laws. Eden gives many accounts of them. They seem to
have suggested a scheme proposed by the worthy Francis Maseres[94]
(1731-1824) in 1772 for the establishment of life annuities. A bill to
give effect to this scheme passed the House of Commons in 1773 with the
support of Burke and Savile, but was thrown out in the House of Lords.
In 1786 John Acland (died 1796), a Devonshire clergyman and justice of
the peace, proposed a scheme for uniting the whole nation into a kind of
friendly society for the support of the poor when out of work and in old
age. It was criticised by John Howlett (1731-1804), a clergyman who
wrote much upon the poor-laws. He attributes the growth of pauperism to
the rise of prices, and calculates that out of an increased expenditure
of L700,000, L219,000 had been raised by the rich, and the remainder
'squeezed out of the flesh, blood, and bones of the poor,' An act for
establishing Acland's crude scheme failed next year in parliament.[95]
The merit of the societies, according to Eden, was their tendency to
stimulate self-help; and how to preserve that merit, while making them
compulsory, was a difficult problem. I have said enough to mark a
critical and characteristic change of opinion. One source of evil
pointed out by contemporaries had been the absence of any central power
which could regulat