neteen to twenty. In the committee a discussion took place
as regarded the effect of the bill in establishing workhouses, a system
which some members disliked; but the clause was retained. Another
discussion also took place on the clause which allowed occupiers
and owners to vote in vestries, the latter having accumulative votes
proportioned to their property. It was objected to as being inconsistent
with popular rights and good management; but it was nevertheless
retained. The forty-fifth clause provided that it should be lawful for
the commissioners, by such orders or regulations as they should
think fit, to declare to what extent the relief to be given might be
administered out of the workhouse. An amendment was moved, "that no rule
or order of the commissioners shall prohibit the guardians of unions
from giving relief out of the workhouse, to such of their sick or
impotent poor, and to such widows, orphans, and illegitimate children,
as they may think fit so to relieve." This amendment, however, was only
supported by forty, while one hundred and forty-eight voted against it.
In the clauses regarding settlement, settlement by having occupied a
tenement, and having been assessed to the poor-rates for one year,
and having paid such assessment, was added to settlement by birth and
marriage.

The clauses which laid the burden of supporting an illegitimate child
on the mother, as if she had been a widow, gave rise to much discussion.
Mr. Robinson moved that they should be omitted, he objecting to them
chiefly on the ground that they removed the liability from the father.
He did not object, he said, to so much of them as repealed certain acts
affecting the mother, but to that part which let the father go free.
The bill proposed, he said, that in case the woman should be unable to
support the child, the liability should rest on the father, or if he
were not alive, or being alive and not able to support it, then the
liability was to fall on the grandfather or grandmother. Could the
house, he asked, seriously entertain propositions of this nature, or
consent to pass enactments so contrary to every principle of justice
and humanity? Lord Althorp protested against these provisions being
discussed as matters of feeling; they should be considered not as they
affected one portion of society, but the whole of it; and looking at it
in this point of view he was prepared to support this part of the bill
as a boon to the female populat