large as the sore." Dr Davenant in his political essays contends that "the Poor Laws seem only to encourage vice and sloth in the nation." John Locke sums up in 1697 the opinion of the time as follows: "The multiplying of the poor and the increase of the poor rate has proceeded neither from scarcity of provisions nor from want of employment since God has blessed these times with plenty … it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners." A hundred years later Lord Kames, the well-known Scottish judge, says: "If it should be reported of a foreign nation that the burden of maintaining the idle and profligate is laid upon the frugal and industrious, what should we say of such a nation? yet this is literally true in England." Finally we have the monumental work of "Eden on the Poor," which is the standard authority for the earlier history of the Poor Law.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the utmost dissatisfaction prevailed, but it was not till 1782 that the crisis came when, by Gilbert's Act, outdoor relief was made obligatory for all except the sick and impotent. From that time forward the onrush of pauperism became fast and furious. The rates, which in 1785 were under £2,000,000, by 1817 were nearly £8,000,000. In many country villages practically the whole population was on the rates. In my own, for instance, where there were last year just nine indoor and nine outdoor paupers for the whole year, costing about £200, the old poor books show that in the year 1831 there were 127 separate grants of relief for a single month, and that for the whole year the expenditure was nearly £1000. Similar conditions prevailed all over the country. Of the deplorable condition of the poor there can be no doubt. It is testified to, passim, by contemporary writers such as Arthur Young, William Cobbett, and Harriet Martineau. It remained for another generation to find the remedy.
And so we see that the Elizabethan Poor Law, which had set out with such a comprehensive programme for
