pport themselves, but whom some temporary relief may enable to
return to their former condition of independence. In each class of cases
it ought to be made equally clear, before public relief were called in,
that those in distress, continuous or temporary, had no near relatives in
a condition to afford them reasonable assistance without undue sacrifice.
Of course it was understood that these conditions included the men and
women who, owing to some temporary lack of employment, were actually
unable to find the means of living by their own honest labor. The ideas
of the commissioners were not pedantically economical in their range, nor
did they insist that public relief must be given only as the reward of
personal integrity when visited by undeserved misfortune. It was freely
admitted that even where men and women had allowed themselves, by
idleness or carelessness, to sink into actual poverty, it was better to
give them temporary relief at the public expense than allow them to take
up with the ways of crime, or leave them to pay the penalty of their
wrongdoings by death from starvation. But it was strictly laid down that
a healthy system of public relief was to help men and women for a time,
in order that they might be able to help themselves once again, as soon
as possible, and to make provision for those who had done their work and
could do no more, and who had no near relatives in a condition to keep
them from starvation. The report of the commissioners pointed out that
the existing system "collects and chains down the laborers in masses,
without any reference to the demand for their labor; that, while it
increases their numbers, it impairs the means by which the fund for their
subsistence is to be reproduced, and impairs the motives for using those
means which it suffers to exist; and that every year and every day these
evils are becoming {227} more overwhelming in magnitude and less
susceptible of cure."

[Sidenote: 1833--Plans to improve the relief system]

The passages which we have quoted are taken from the recommendations of
Mr. Chadwick. He goes on to say that, "of those evils, that which
consists merely in the amount of the rates--an evil great when considered
by itself, but trifling when compared with the moral effects which I am
deploring--might be much diminished by the combination of workhouses, and
by substituting a rigid administration and contract management for the
existing scenes of neglect, ext