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settlement, by the Poor Law Amendment Act, were, practically speaking, quite trifling, excepting that it prospectively repealed, but retrospectively preserved, settlement by hiring and service.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. liar privilege of the poor. The abolition of settlement by hiring and service, and the various restrictions introduced in respect of the acquisition of other settlements, have, upon the whole, had a great effect in rendering it in all cases difficult, and in the vast majority of cases impossible, for any adult labourer ever now to acquire a settlement at all. If no further change should take place in the law, more and more will the question of settlement resolve itself, as it has already begun to resolve itself, into one of pedigree, and into determining the locality of a father's or a grandfather's birth. The existing law of birth settlement is most absurd, and involves parishes in great uncertainty and expense. The absurdity consists in this: that any derivative settlement, from either parent, is held to prevent that of the proper place of birth from arising; and, as the law now stands, any order for a pauper's removal to any birth settlement, whether his own or that of his father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, may be quashed, on appeal, by showing the birth settlement of a more remote ancestor. The more remote the derivation of the settlement, the greater is the uncertainty and cost of proof. In the course of my experience, I have, on two occasions, known the settlement of a greatgrandfather satisfactorily made out, on the trial of appeals against orders of removal; but so made out with great difficulty, and at much expense. It would seem that the whole title of "derivative settlement," or "settlement by parentage," which now occupies a large space in treatises on the poor laws, is founded on an unnecessary and erroneous construction of the statute of Charles II.; but the error is one that was adopted more than a century ago, and cannot now be rectified by anything less than an act of Parliament.* It has always appeared to me that the intention of the statute of Charles II. would have been far better carried out, if the Court of King's Bench had not engrafted on it this monstrous excrescence of derivative settlements. There is nothing in the statute to indicate an intention of the legislature to make a man removable to the place in which his father or grandfather was born: the re Obviously the place of a man's settlement is no longer the place of his industrial residence; and is likely enough to be a place in which he is an entire stranger. An agricultural labourer working, since 1834, under a yearly contract of hiring and service, from youth till old age, in the parish of his birth, will still be settled, at seventy years of age, in any extremity of the kingdom in which his father may have happened to be born; while, on the other hand, a mere child, if apprenticed by parish officers, and, as is very generally done, so apprenticed by them into a parish different from their own, would even now, in 1851, by forty days residence in such parish, acquire a settlement there*, and, in all likelihood, moval is to be, to the place, either of the man's own nativity, or the place in which he may have resided for forty days in some character specified in the statute. The words of the statute authorised removal "to such parish where he or they were last legally settled, either as a native, householder, sojourner, apprentice, or servant, for the space of forty days at the least." The error of construction seems to have been committed in consequence of an attempt made, by order of removal, to separate the unemancipated child from its parent. The Court thereupon held, that the parent's birth, or other settlement, was transmitted, as an inheritance, to his unemancipated child; instead of merely holding, as it would seem they ought to have done, that although irremovable from the parent while unemancipated (or up to seven, fourteen, sixteen, or twentyone years of age, as might have been thought most consistent with the principles of the common law respecting the relation of parent and child), yet that such child, as soon as separable from the parent, should be removed to the place of his own birth, not to that of his parent. That the vast arena of suffering of the poor (opened by the doctrine of derivative settlements, and the consequent transportation of the poor, under removal orders, to foreign and distant counties), arose as above suggested, will be apparent to any one who takes the trouble of reading the case of St. Katherine and St. George, in Fortescue's Reports, p. 218. Lord Chief Justice Parker there says, "It is as unnatural to force a child from the mother as from the father; so that if she gains a settlement, the children must too." The only principle needed in these cases, is found in Ulpian, lib. 20., ad Sabinum, in D. XXXIII. 7. De instruct. vel instrum. legato, 12. 7. "Uxores quoque et infantes eorum, qui supra enumerati sunt, in eadem villa agentes, credendum est voluisse testatorem legato contineri, neque enim duram separationem injunxisse credendus est:" And "agnatio vel affinitas" was equally respected, in the case of serfs or colons adscriptitiæ conditionis (the settled agricultural labourers of the Roman empire), by a Constitution of Constantine, C. iii. 38. (Commun. utr. jud.) 11. "Quis enim ferat, liberos à parentibus, à fratribus sorores, à viris conjuges segregari ?” *On a recent occasion, I was counsel in a case of appeal, in which the parish of St. J. C. (not in any union) had apprenticed a parish pauper into St. L. M., no subsequent act of his life would ever free him from that settlement. The statute 9 & 10 Vict. c. 66., preventing removal of the poor, in certain cases of long-continued residence, will be considered in the next chapter. In the meantime we may say of this law of settlement, that it is substantially as bad now as it was fifty years ago; and that, so far as its operations on the poor is concerned, it still deserves all the reprobation which was justly bestowed on it by those who, in the eighteenth century, pointed out its impolicy and injustice. the master having been induced to take the child by a fee of 51., provided by some charity funds in the hands of the churchwardens. The child served and resided with his master more than forty days in St. L. M.; fell into society like that to which little Oliver Twist was exposed; was charged with felony, convicted, and imprisoned. His indenture was hereupon cancelled; and, on his discharge from prison, he wandered back to the parish of St. J. C. within six months of the day of his original binding: whereupon an order of removal was obtained for conveying him to the parish of St. L. M., in which, by virtue of the operation of the parish officers of St. J. C., a settlement had been created. The appeal was against this order of removal, which, however, on the trial, was properly confirmed, the present law undoubtedly sanctioning such a binding. CHAP. XIII. THE PAUPERISM AND POOR LAWS OF ENGLAND, SINCE THE PASSING OF THE POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT, IN 1834. Hocc' est, advorso nixantem trudere monte LUCRETIUS. SLIGHTLY as the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 interfered with the principle of previous legislation, nevertheless, the creation of a central board able to repress administrative abuses, effected a great and immediate reduction in the sum annually expended in relieving the poor. The outlay of 6,790,7997. in 1833, was reduced, for the year 1837, to 4,171,6927., the price of wheat being nearly the same sum, 52s. 9d. the quarter, in each of those years. But even Gilbert's Act, 22 George III. c. 83., and its administrative reforms, seems to have been followed, at first, by a considerable diminution in the expense of maintaining the poor, although the provisions of that statute involved a wide and dangerous departure from the principle of the statute of Elizabeth. The Poor Law Commissioners, created by the statute of 1834, at first caused the workhouse test to be applied with great severity; and perhaps the sudden and great diminution in the cost of pauperism, which ensued, was, in part, owing to the severe application of that test. The merely "official pauperism" of relief lists, must vary with the nature of the conditions on which such relief is given. In the Third Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, it is stated, in reference to the reduced expenditure of the previous year, that the new system of administration had passed through the ordeal of an extremely severe winter, and of a general rise in the cost of provisions; and latterly, moreover, through a |