Hardly a pledge of considerable value but had duplicate notes. For years the cash books had never been compared with the vouchers. Persons whose names appeared as large borrowers denied all knowledge of the transactions. By concealing the fact that a licence had been granted to increase their capital, the managers bought up shares at £6, to sell them shortly afterwards for £10. Thompson, who engineered this, was thanked nem. con. at a General Court of Directors, and leave was asked to put his portrait in their house. Bond, another director, when told that "the coining of notes and bonds was inconsistent with their charter for relieving the poor, "said: "Damn the poor : let's go into the city and get money for ourselves."[1] Walpole declared that his conduct in this matter should be the test of the integrity of his life. The affair assumed the proportions of a Jacobite plot. It was asserted that Thompson—who fled the country, and went to Rome—had stolen the money for the Pretender. Finally, a Bill was passed for a lottery to raise £400,000 for the sufferers by his huge swindle. It is a striking proof of the magnitude of the question of poverty that a company should have been formed to relieve it, able to swindle its shareholders to he tune of half-a-million.
It is evident that Elizabeth's Act of Settlement had a considerable share in increasing out-o'-works. Child had called it both cruel and stupid. It sent a man to a parish where there was no work for him—just because he was born there—while he could have found good work elsewhere. Moreover, it sent him off if he was likely to become chargeable." These points were now amended—he was not sent back till he actually was chargeable, and he was not to be sent back, as formerly, though he might be so sick that his life was endangered.
The great difference in wages in various parts of the country shows that the Act of Settlement must have worked deplorably. A few years before this time the Justices of Worcester had set a haymaker's wages at 4d. a day, with meat, and 8d. without; a mower's, 6d. or 1s., a reaper's the same. But in 1651 the Chelmsford Justices had fixed 10d. or 18d. for a mower; 12d. or 22d. for a reaper, and 8d.
- ↑ See Pope's "Moral Essays," 3rd Epistle, for a reference to Bond.
