airs
of the parishes, of whom the local clergy and magistrates were the
principal personages. The means had to be furnished by the taxpayers,
and the influential men of each parish were left to decide as to the
claims and the deserts of the applicants. There was no regular body
answerable to public opinion, nor was there indeed any practical way in
which the public of a district could very effectively express itself.
Nothing could be better arranged for the development of that benevolent
spirit which Sydney Smith describes as common to all humanity, and {222}
under the influence of which no sooner does A hear that B is in distress
than he thinks C ought at once to relieve him. Men and women had only to
go and say that they were in distress, and some influential persons in
the neighborhood were sure to find that the easiest way of doing a
benevolent act was to provide them with orders for parochial relief
inside or outside the workhouse. There seemed to be a sort of easy-going
impression prevailing everywhere that when a man or a woman or a family
had once been set down for relief from the rates the enrolment ought to
endure as a kind of property for life, and even as an inheritance for
future generations. The grant of parish relief under the old ways has
been humorously likened to a State pension, which, when it has once been
given, is never supposed to be revoked during the lifetime of the
privileged pensioner. But the presumption in the case of those relieved
by the parish had a still more abiding efficacy, for it was assumed that
if a man got parish relief for himself and his family the beneficent
endowment was to pass onward from generation to generation. It is quite
certain that whole races of paupers began to grow up in the country, one
family depending on the rates engendering another family, who were
likewise to be dependent on the rates. Thus the vice of lazy and
shiftless poverty was bequeathed from pauper sire to son. In the case of
the ordinary man or woman there was no incitement to industry and
perseverance. The idle pauper would be fed in any case, and no matter
how hard he worked at the ordinary labor within his reach he could only
hope to be poorly fed. Indeed, even the man who had an honest
inclination for honest labor was very much in the condition of the Irish
cottier tenant, described many years afterwards by John Stuart Mill as
one who could neither benefit by his industry nor suffer by hi