te," that is, to those who required "necessary
relief"--according to the actual wording of the statute. The economic
fallacy of home industries founded on rate-supplied capital early
declared itself, and the method could only have continued as long as it
did because it formed part of a general system of industrial control.
When in the 18th century workhouses were established, the same
industrial fallacy, as records show, repeated itself under new
conditions. Within the parish it resulted in the farmer paying the
labourer as small a wage as possible, and leaving the parish to provide
whatever he might require in addition during his working life and in his
old age. Thus, indeed, a gigantic experiment in civic employment was
made for at least two centuries on a vast scale throughout the
country--and failed. As was natural, the lack of economic independence
reacted on the morals of the people. With pauperism came want of energy,
idleness and a disregard for chastity and the obligations of marriage.
The law, it is true, recognized the mutual obligations of parents and
grandparents, children and grandchildren; but in the general poverty
which it was itself a means of perpetuating such obligations became
practically obsolete, while at all times they are difficult to enforce.
Still, the fact that they were recognized implies a great advance in
charitable thought. The act, passed at first from year to year, was very
slowly put in force. Even before it was passed the poor-rate first
assessed under the act of 1563 was felt to be "a greater tax than some
subsidies," and in the time of Charles II. it amounted to a third of the
revenue of England and Wales (Rogers, v. 81).

The service of villein and cottar was, as we have now seen, in part
superseded by what we have called a statutory wage-control, founded on a
basis of wage supplemented by relief, provided by a rate-supported
poor-law. But it follows that with the decay of this system the poor-law
itself should have disappeared, or should have taken some new and very
limited form. Unfortunately, as in Roman times, state relief proved to
be a popular and vigorous parasite that outlived the tree on which it
was rooted: assessments of wage under the Statute of Labourers fell into
disuse after the Restoration, it is said, and the statute was finally
repealed in 1814, and sixty years later the act against illegal
combinations of working men; but the serfdom of the poor-law, the
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