legal result of the two appeals, therefore, is, that of these three parishes, the innocent parish, as it is called, the only one parish in which admittedly the pauper is not settled, is to maintain him, and can never remove him again to either of the two parishes, in one or the other of which, admittedly, the pauper is settled.

But it would exhaust my reader's patience, and waste his time, further to dwell on such minute details. There now exist throughout England great grievances, equally suffered by those who pay relief to the poor, and by those who receive it. Such grievances will be discussed in subsequent pages; will probably be found to spread over a wide field for comprehensive legislation; and will at least require a total repeal of the law of settlement and removal.

CHAP. XII.

THE PAUPER LEGISLATION OF THE YEAR 1834.

Regemque dedit, qui fœdere certo

Et premere, et laxas sciret dare jussus habenas. VIRGIL.

THE Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, is, and will ever remain, a most important step in the history of the pauperism and poor laws of England. Nevertheless, it was little more than an improvement in administrative machinery, and merely provided means of ensuring a due performance of that duty of relieving the poor, the neglect of which had been attended by great injury to all classes of the community. Parliament did little to cut away the root of those evils, which were glaring and admitted, and which no merely administrative change could remove. The most valuable part of the Report of the Commissioners is, perhaps, that which was least attended to by Parliament, and which shows the evils produced by the law of settlement and removal.

It is greatly to be regretted that the Poor Law Amendment Act did not adopt the judicious recommendation of the Commissioners in respect of an extensive reform of that law. The Report had stated the opinion of the Commissioners, that (subject to the obvious exception of persons born in prisons, hospitals, and workhouses,) the settlement of every legitimate child, born after the passing of the intended act, should follow that of the parents or surviving parent of such child, until such child should attain the age of sixteen years, or the death of its surviving parent, and that, at the age of sixteen, or on the death of its surviving parent, such child should be considered as settled in the place in which it was born.* This advice, if adopted, would have been a great simplifying of the

* Report, folio edition, p. 193.

law, and would have conferred a great benefit on the community. By the variety of successive statutory restrictions introduced into the law of settlement and removal, that law, by 1834, had greatly increased in complexity and uncertainty. Speaking of settlements, in a comparatively simple state of the statute law, Dr. Burn had said, in 1764, "It has been the work of an age to ascertain the law respecting them!"

That good work, if accomplished in 1764, was certainly rendered of little use in the nineteenth century, when every session of parliament added something to the previous patchwork of arbitrary legislation. Our mixed state of social luxury and pauperism, perhaps, not unnaturally, led to many legislative provisions. Corruptissima civitate, plurimæ leges." But, notwithstanding the multifariousness of these laws, and of the evils produced by them, and many of which were pointed out by the Commissioners of 1833, the legislature, in 1834, did but little, either to simplify the law, or to remove the evils. This will probably be the inference of every one who compares the Report of the Commissioners of 1833, with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The legislature certainly did a great deal less than the Commissioners thought absolutely necessary, to mitigate the evils of the law of settlement. Attention was mainly given by the legislature, in the statute 4 & 5 Will. IV. c. 76., to improvement in the mere administration of relief, to the organisation of the union boards, and to the control conferred on a central authority. One head of settlement alone was repealed, and trifling restrictions were imposed in respect of some others; but the main and essential evils of the law of settlement and removal, were not substantially interfered with.

Among many prominent evils of the law, to which the attention of the legislature was in vain invited by the Commissioners, were those flowing from settlement by apprenticeship. Mere chance, in the first instance, often ascertained only by an expensive litigation, occurring forty or fifty years after the event in dispute, decides whether one parish or another is to keep a family, in which there is such an inheritance as a settlement by apprenticeship. The state of the law, as it

still exists in 1852, is correctly set forth in the Report of the Commission of 1833.* "An apprentice is settled finally in the parish where he sleeps the last night in his condition of apprentice, provided he has slept there, either continuously or at different times, though with intervals, even of years, for forty days in the whole. In the meantime he carries with him, wherever he goes, a contingent right of settlement, and may, in fact, gain as many settlements as there are periods of forty days in the period of his apprenticeship; each fresh settlement, suspending all the previous ones, subject to their revival, if his last night is spent in any parish, in which he has slept, as an apprentice, for thirty-nine days. Bitter complaints are made of this grievance, by the ratepayers of towns having ports, or situated on the banks of navigable rivers. —And it is on absurdities like these that the question depends, whether parish A, or parish B, neither of which has any real connection with the pauper, neither of which could, by any vigilance, have prevented his acquiring a settlement, is to support him and his family for ever. To these evils must be added the perjury and falsehood which seem peculiarly incidental to these inquiries. - Settlements are claimed by hiring and service under masters who have long been dead, under apprenticeship when the indentures are lost or destroyed, by renting a tenement when houses have been pulled down. And they are rebutted or supported by narratives of conversations which occurred, perhaps, twenty years before, and which were not of a nature to dwell on the memories of those who proffer to report them."

Some of the reasons for abolishing settlement by apprenticeship, were again distinctly stated by the Poor Law Commissioners many years ago in their annual Report. "Pauper boys and girls have often been apprenticed merely to get them a settlement in another parish, and without any reference to the ability of the master to maintain or instruct them. A species of slavery of the worst kind is thus created. Needy persons take the apprentices for the sake of the premiums,

* Report, pp. 88, 89. 91.

nominally to teach them a trade, really to employ them as mere drudges in household work.”*

The changes introduced into the law of settlement, by the Poor Law Amendment Act, were, practically speaking, quite trifling, excepting that it prospectively repealed, but retrospectively preserved, settlement by hiring and service for a year. The various objections to this head of settlement were so universally admitted, that it could not be wholly retained; but the miserable half-measure of its merely prospective repeal, may be judged of by the fact that a large proportion of orders, even now, are made on alleged settlements by hiring and service prior to 1834. In 1841 no less than 2341 orders out of the 8412 of the year, were made on this single ground.‡

The wisdom of Parliament, therefore, provides for the removal of a grievance from some future race, but leaves the present and the next generation to endure all the evils which arise from the litigation of such questions.

We now discuss the hiring and service of a father or mother; and in another quarter of a century, should the law of settlement and removal remain unaltered, the father will have become a grandfather, the mother a grandmother, and the hiring and service of grandfather or grandmother will be the turning point of an appeal at sessions.

It may be supposed that the settlement by hiring and service, completed before the passing of the act, was preserved on account of an imagined, but most mistaken analogy between a settlement and a right of property; and there was once a time, as appears by the Law Reports, when judges used to speak of a settlement as a thing to be favoured in the law, and when they seemed to consider it not in its real light of a great restriction on natural liberty, but as a pecu

* Ninth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1843, p. 50. On subsequent occasions, the same Commissioners have again expressed their unfavourable opinion of that state of servitude, which is created by the apprenticeship of parish children. Eleventh Annual Report, 1845, p. 16.

† 4 & 5 Will. IV. c. 76. s. 64.

Ninth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, p. 45.