little attic, where they and their seven, eight, or nine children have slept together for fifteen or twenty years. If you are a novelist of the modern school in search of new and horrible crimes, you may get some stories from the old women about their sons and daughters, which, if your soul does not shrink from seeing human nature dissected and exposed in such ghastly shape, will enable you to outvie the most sensational authors in their peculiar line. I dare not hint to you American ladies and gentlemen of those things which benevolent Samaritans are obliged to sound of the depths of sorrow and wickedness in those fair country districts. Earning ten or eleven shillings a week; on that expected to bring up their families; regularly falling back in winter on the poor-rates; always resorting to the parish dispensary and doctor in times of sickness; ignorant, famine-fed, with a distress which has no outlet and little reprieve, such is the lot in many a district of merry England of those who till the soil.

Story of a farm

Ludlow.

XXX.

STORY OF A FARM LABOURER AT LUDLOW.

I heard a man at Ludlow, before a labourer at crowded meeting of employés and labourers who had known him from his youth, tell the simple story of his experiences in life.

He

'I was the son of a farm labourer. earnt 8s. a week. I began as a boy to scare the crows, and went on till I could plough and drive a team, and reap and do amost anything. When I married, wages were nine shillin a week. We had five children, and She were ill for two in her bed, and slowly

then my wife fell ill.

year off and on, lying

dying the whole time. The doctor said she wanted better food. We had nothing more to eat but bread, and a drop o' cabbage soup, and a bit o' bacon now and then. The doctor said the best thing for her was milk. I went to missis, (theer warn't no milk to be bought in the neighbourhood), and told her what the doctor said, and asked her fur to

sell me a little milk every day for my wife. She said, "Do 'ee spoase I can sell 'ee any milk when I want it to fatten the pigs?" My wife didn't have no milk, and she died. I asked maister to increase my wages. He says, No, Robert, I can't do that without the rest do it. If I was to rise wages 'thout they agreed, I daresent show my face to market. I can't afoord to pay no more

wages.

When you consider that these are not isolated and anomalous facts, but that they suggest the realities of hundreds of thousands of lives, you will begin dimly to apprehend the extent and gravity of the problems which the English reformer has to face.

XXXI.

THE POOR LAWS AND PAUPERISM.

But the picture is not yet complete. Before The PoorI outline its redeeming features—and thank

God, there is sunshine too!-there are yet shadows to be added. When Dante was

laws and pauperism.

investigating the infernal regions he was always coming on some place or incident worse than the last. So I have yet to introduce and I do it with a practical pur

you,

pose as you will see, to that fearful closet of our great English house-THE POOR-LAW SYSTEM.

Pauperism in England—that is, as a system of systematised poverty-is the growth of three hundred years. Taking its spring from the days of Henry VIII., it was established by an Act passed in the forty-third year of Queen Elizabeth. The principle of that Act is communistic. It is that everyone in England who cannot find or undertake employment is entitled to relief from the state perhaps,' says Professor Fawcett, 'the most perilous responsibility ever assumed by a nation.' At first this relief was restricted, being given only to the impotent poor, and in the workhouse; the able-bodied poor were compelled to work for it.

In about a hundred and fifty years, whether it were owing to an increase of population in excess of the field of employ

ment, or from whatever circumstance, the
number of claimants increased, unions of
parishes were formed, and that practice of
assisting able-bodied persons either wholly or
in part without obliging them to enter a
workhouse, now called 'outdoor relief,' was
by degrees introduced. Men received grants See
of money in aid of wages.
assistance in their homes.

Fawcett

Women received on 'Pau-
The greater the etc.'

number of children a man had the more he
obtained from the guardians of the poor. So
burdensome were the incidents of this system
that Laws of Settlement were enacted to im-
pose the responsibility of keeping these
people on the parishes in which they were
born or wherein they had lived for a certain
length of time. The rates became enormous.
The labouring classes, too well provided for,
and sure of a maintenance, were thoroughly
demoralised. In one case three generations.
of the same family were found to be receiving
relief and drawing from the rates 100l. a
year. In one parish in Berkshire, the whole
land was offered to the assembled paupers,
but they refused it, preferring the ease of
recipience to the troubles of ownership.

perism,