tion came, no doubt, from men of old-fashioned ways,
who dreaded and hated any changes in any institutions to which they had
been accustomed, and who held that even pauperism itself acquired a
certain sanctity from the fact that it had been fostered and encouraged
by the wisdom of so many succeeding generations. Some of the opposition,
however, was inspired by feelings of a more purely sentimental, and
therefore perhaps of a more respectable order. It was urged that the new
system, if carried into law, would bear hardly on the deserving as well
as the undeserving people; that the workhouse test would separate the
husband from wife, and the father from the children; and, above all, that
certain clauses of the new measure would leave the once innocent girl who
had been led astray by some vile tempter to bear the whole legal
responsibility as well as the public shame of her sin. It is not
necessary for us now to go over at any length the long arguments which
were brought up on both sides of the controversy. Many capable and
high-minded observers were carried away by what may be called the
sentimental side of the question, and forgot the enormous extent of the
almost national corruption which the measure was striving to remove, in
their repugnance to some of the evils which it did not indeed create, but
which it failed to abolish. One weakness common to nearly all the
arguments employed against the {229} measure came from the facility there
was for putting out of sight altogether, during such a process of
reasoning, the fact that the daily and hourly effect of the existing
system was to force the deserving and hard-working poor to sink into that
very pauperism which it was the object of all law-makers to diminish, or
to abolish altogether. The wit of man could not devise any system of
poor relief which should never go wrong in its application, should never
bear harshly on men and women who deserved, and were striving for, an
honest and independent subsistence.

The Bill, however, was passed in the House of Commons by a large
majority. It was carried after a hard fight through the House of Lords,
and received the royal assent in August, 1834. It should be said that
the Duke of Wellington, although usually strong and resolute as a party
man, had good sense and fair spirit enough to make him a warm supporter
of the measure, despite the vehement protestations of many of his own
habitual supporters. Since that time it se