"badge" all parish poor, "by virtue of which badge they are permitted to go into the parish at such an hour of the day and receive such broken bread and meat as their neighbours have to give … neither should these poor people go under such a dishonourable name as beggars but be called invited guests." A similar objection is now often raised against the use of the name "pauper."
About the same time Sir Matthew Hale published "A Discourse touching Provision for the Poor." Of the Act of Elizabeth he makes the pithy remark, "The plaster is not so large as the sore."
In 1685 Dr Davenant, in co-operation with Gregory King, the statistician of the day, published his political essays. He points out that "one limb of the body politic is drawing away the nourishment from the other," and that "the poor laws seem only to encourage vice and sloth in the nation." He proposes the formation of a corporation with a capital of £300,000 for employing the poor.
John Locke, the author of the "Essay upon the Human Understanding," was asked to draw up a report upon the subject for the Board of Trade in 1697. The "multiplying of the poor and the increase of the poor rate," he says, "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." The chief remedy proposed by him are "working schools" for the children of the poor, with maintenance for children between three and fourteen years of age. Of his proposals Eden says a hundred years later "that they will at least afford this consolation to the many patriotic, though unsuccessful, philanthropists who since his time have attempted the arduous work
