to which she did not belong, was to be liable to whipping and six months' imprisonment. Yet notwithstanding all this severity the poor were ever on the increase.
Some seventy years after the Elizabethan Poor Law had been in operation the rates had risen to no less a sum than £840,000 a year. Twelve years later, 1685, the poor were numbered at 1,330,000 heads, 400,000 of whom were in receipt of parish relief. By the reign of Queen Anne the maintenance of the poor cost one million sterling.
During the early years of the eighteenth century the rapid growth of pauperism occupied many powerful minds, but the remedies they proposed were not adopted, or quite failed to arrest its progress; so that in 1795, Mr. Fox told the House of Commons "that the greater part of the working classes of the country were lying at the mercy and almost lay on the charity of the rich." Mr. Fox was far from exaggerating the disease, for English pauperism was now entering an acute stage. By the end of the War it could be said to have risen fifty per cent., and there were very few of the labouring classes out of its grasp.
To estimate the full force of this steady growth of pauperism we must never lose sight of the fact that it took place side by side with an ever-enlarging commerce, with the development of the manufacturing system and the enormous increase in the wealth of the ruling classes.
The writers of the early part of the eighteenth century—Locke, Defoe, Sir Joshua Child, Mandeville, and Henry Fielding—more or less attribute it to relaxation in discipline and corruption in manners. They appear to have thought, and probably with reason, that through careless management, a great deal of the money went in the support of idleness and debauchery. When we recall the laws by which, in addition to their long education in servility and dependence, the labourers were drawn into the practice of poaching, smuggling, and the worst forms of drinking, our surprise will be how any virtue could remain in the labouring poor, how it was possible for any of them to have escaped this cesspool of moral misery into which their whole class was falling.
Defoe tells a story which gives us a pretty idea of the kind of men who in the seventeenth century had the fate of the agricultural
