s
improvidence.

[Sidenote: 1832--Some defects in the poor-law system]

The system may be said without exaggeration to have put a positive
premium on immorality among the poorer class of women in a district, for
an unmarried girl who had pauper offspring to show was sure to receive
the liberal benefit of parochial relief. Pity was easily aroused for
{223} her youth, her fall, her deserted condition when her lover or
betrayer had taken himself off to some other district. Any tale of
deceived innocence was readily believed, and so far as physical comforts
go the unmarried mother was generally better off than the poor toiling
and virtuous wife of the hard-worked laborer who found her family growing
and her husband's wages without any increase. Then, of course, there was
all manner of jobbery, and a certain kind of corruption among parish
officials and the local tradesmen and employers of labor generally, which
grew to be an almost recognized incident of the local institutions.
Labor could be got on cheaper terms than the ordinary market rates if the
employers could have men or women at certain seasons of the year whom the
parish was willing to maintain in idleness for the rest of the time.
Small contracts of all kinds were commonly made, in this sort of fashion,
between parish officials and local employers, and the whole system of
relief seemed to become converted into a corrupting influence, pervading
the social life and showing its effects in idleness, immorality, and an
infectious disease of pauperism. Owing to the many misinterpretations of
the laws of settlement it was often easy for a rich and populous district
to fling much of its floating pauperism on some poorer region, and thus
it frequently happened that the more poverty-stricken the parish the
greater was the proportion of unsettled pauperism for which it had to
provide. In many districts the poorer classes of ratepayers were
scarcely a degree better off than the actual paupers whom they were taxed
to support. Thus many a struggling family became pauperized in the end
because of the increase in the rates which the head of the family could
no longer pay, and the exhausted breadwinner, having done his best to
keep himself and his family independent, had at last to eat the bread of
idleness from parish relief, or to starve with his family by the
road-side.

Things had come to such a pass indeed that many earnest and capable
observers, like Lord Brougham,