§ The Order of the Day for resuming the debate on this Bill having been read,
MR. RICEexpressed his regret that hon. Member for Oxfordshire (Mr. Henley) was not in his place, as he was anxious to make a few observations upon the objections which that hon. Member had taken to the measure before the House. Those objections were, first, as to the provision for reshifting the burdens on the several parishes of a union by altering the mode 903 of raising the rate; secondly, that the measure would lead to the breaking down of the parochial system; thirdly, that it would lead to the still further measure of a national rate; and lastly, that it was a great measure that would throw on agricultural districts a heavy burden heretofore borne by the towns; and the hon. Gentleman concluded by moving that the Bill be read that day six months. With regard to the first objection, that of the mode of rating and the shifting of the burden, the objection was, that the rating, instead of being taken on the three years' average, should now be taken on the rateable value generally throughout the union. He had just received a communication containing the valuation of one of the largest unions in this country, and one of the best managed unions. The percentage on the average of the last three years on the rateable value in the parishes of that union varied from 13 to 14 per cent, to rather less than 1 per cent. The hon. Gentleman said that he thought this proposed alteration was very unjust. He recollected that when Sir J. Graham introduced the Settlement Bill he agreed to an instruction to the Committee proposed by the hon. Member for Malton for enacting what was called a union settlement. On the change of Government, the Bill fell into the hands of the noble Lord at the head of the present Government; and the right hon. Baronet again stated his conviction that if the Bill should be passed into a law without the Amendment proposed being adopted, the greatest injustice and hardship would be inflicted on many parts of the country. The Bill was passed into a law without the Amendment of the hon. Member for Malton being introduced, when during the very first year most convincing proof was given of the entire truth of the right hon. Baronet's prediction. Before the end of that year he presented several petitions from large urban parishes complaining of the ruinous effects of the Bill. The agricultural parishes which surrounded the town of Dover were particularly affected by the law. In one of those parishes a great number of streets were built for the poor people; and the moment the Bill passed the main portion of those poor persons were thrown on the already pauperised parishes in the neighbourhood, so that they were nearly ruined. The injustice of this was so manifest, that at a late period of the Session last year it was felt impossible to avoid providing an immediate remedy of 904 a temporary character for the evil, and accordingly a Bill was introduced by Mr. Bodkin, called the Poor Removal Act, which was passed, and which would expire on the 1st of October next. The effect of the present system of parochial rates and settlement was that the labourers were often compelled to live a long distance from their work; they had frequently to walk home to their meals in the wet, and return to work without having had time to dry their clothes. This was a great hardship, and yet the hon. Member for Oxfordshire had opposed the present measure, which was a first step towards a better system. The next objection of the hon. Member was, that this Bill was a breaking down of the parochial system; but he was surprised the hon. Member could have so much misunderstood the right hon. Gentletleman (Mr. Buller), who announced his decided determination to adhere to the parochial system. He believed they would never have a system which would be just to the ratepayers until they made the rating co-extensive with the union and the jurisdiction of the board of guardians. He was, therefore, in favour of an union rate; but it did not follow, as the hon. Member for Oxfordshire appeared to suppose, that those who were in favour of an union rating and settlement must also be favourable to a national rating. The right hon. Gentleman had truly stated that there was a growing feeling in the country in favour of an union rating; and he would maintain that the agitation in the country must be founded on reason and justice, or else it would not be rife. The hon. Member said that the right hon. Gentleman ought not to have condemned as he did the system of private rating which prevailed in some parishes. Now, he maintained that of all systems that of private rating was the worst. The hon. Member put the case of a man with a large family earning 10s. a week wages, and said that the poor-law was no test of idleness or destitution to such a man, because he knew that if he went into the workhouse he should cost the parish 18s. a week for the support of himself and his family. Every man was acquainted with one or two idle men in his parish; but such a case as the hon. Member had alluded to was the exception, and not the rule. Let them give the agricultural labourers anything like fair wages, and there was not one man in one hundred who would not rather earn his own subsistence than lead an idle life in the workhouse. 905 And the poor man had no fairer claim than that of a, fair day's wages for a fair day's work. In the county to which he belonged (Kent), the labourers were receiving 15s. a week wages, when in other counties they were only receiving 7s. Now that wheat was at 44s. or 43s. a quarter, the rate of wages in Kent was 12s. a week, while in the west of England it was only 7s. or 8s. The rate of wages in Kent varied from 10s. to 18s.; but with wheat at 35s. a quarter the farmers never thought of reducing wages below 10s. It would he much better if other counties made an attempt to pay their labourers after the same rate. With regard to vagrancy, the hon. Member for Oxfordshire said it might become a national question, and he was in favour of a national payment for vagrancy. But he (Mr. Rice) thought the administration of the law with regard to vagrancy would be much better under this Bill, because it would give the poor-law guardians an interest in seeing that their officers looked sharp after the vagrants, He did not think that the objections of the hon. Member for Oxffordshire would be successful in this instance. The present measure was absolutely necessary; and he hoped that the hon. Member would not seriously oppose its going into Committee, but that he would confine his opposition to an endeavour to amend the Bill in Committee. He supported the Bill because it was both necessary and just to the ratepayers, and at the same time merciful to the poor.
§ MR. ROBERT PALMERsaid, the object of the Bill was to meet two grievances; in the first place, the vagrant question; and, secondly, that of the irremovable poor. With respect to the charges fur vagrancy, there was no person who would not agree that a grievous burden should not be thrown upon any particular parish because the union workhouse happened to be built in that parish. He would agree that this charge should be made upon the union instead of upon the particular parish where the relief was given. But with respect to the general question of vagrancy, the right hon. Gentleman appeared to be of opinion that the suppression of vagrancy rested with the administrators of the law rather than with, the Legislature itself; and the right hon. Gentleman said that vagrancy ought to be kept down, He would agree that it ought; but the question was how to keep it down. It was a very difficult thing for the relieving officer to say what cases he would relieve, 906 and what he would reject. If he refused relief to a wandering beggar, such cases were reported and got before the pub-lie in a variety of ways; and very harsh, and often, he knew, very erroneous statements were published with regard to the relieving officer. If the right hon. Gentleman could suggest any means by which the relieving officers in unions could exercise their judgment in respect to cases of vagrancy, so as to reduce the system of vagrancy and the amount of these charges, he would confer great service, not only upon those persons themselves, but also upon the ratepayers. With respect to the irremovable poor, it was proposed to throw the expense of maintaining them upon the union at large instead of upon the parish in which they happened to reside. He had opposed the last law, which put the poor who had resided five years in towns upon the footing of irremovability, because he believed it would be a heavy burden upon the towns; but now that it had been enforced, and the Committee had reported their opinion to be that the principle of the law should be continued, the House would not be inclined, he thought, to repeal that law; and it would be better to put parishes upon the footing proposed by the right hon. Gentleman. He should not object to go into Committee upon the Bill, unless on the ground that it was brought forward at so late a period of the Session; and that it was desirable that more time should he given for its discussion. But the charges for vagrancy and irremovability stood upon a very different footing from the other portion of the Bill, which proposed to place the establishment charges of unions upon the new footing of a general rate on the property of the union. One of the arguments alleged in favour of placing all the union charges upon the same footing was, that it would be very inconvenient to have two rates levied on two different principles. The right hen. Gentleman had, however, himself proposed in the Bill to have two modes of assessment, because, although be wished to place the establishment charges, and also the vagrancy and irremovable poor charges, upon the general relateable property of the union, he proposed to continue the old assessment where there was a debt on the parishes to be paid. He thought the new charges ought to be left upon the same footing as the old. The right hon. Gentleman had asked whether it was right that the establishment charges of unions should he borne in the same proportions 907 as the pauperism of parishes, and stated that the chief establishment charges were for building and maintaining work-houses and the salaries of officers. He should have thought these charges were fairly assessable according to the amount of pauperism, as originally settled on that basis, because otherwise they would fall exceedingly hard upon some parishes, particularly small parishes, where the property was in the hands of one or two proprietors, or even a single occupier, where the population was necessarily small, and the whole of the persons legally settled in the parishes were employed by that occupier. Such parishes required no union workhouse, no salary of officers, and were liable to no establishment charges of their own. But these parishes had been brought by the poor-law into the unions, and it would be unfair to overturn the arrangement by which they paid the proportion of their former outlay on these charges, and to place these establishment charges on the general rating of property in the union. The right hon. Gentleman had instanced the salaries of medical officers as a branch of the establishment charges which ought to be paid by the union generally; but it struck him that if there was any one officer whose salary might fairly be paid by parishes according to the proportion of their pauperism, it was the medical officer. If they took the case of a large parish with 100 paupers, and a smaller parish with ten, it was fair to presume, cœteris paribus, the healthiness of both parishes being alike, that the larger parish would require ten times more medical attendance than the smaller parish. There was, therefore, no reason why his salary should not be paid in proportion to the pauperism as well as the rest of the establishment charges. The House ought to consider what the effect of altering the mode of rating would be on the value of property in parishes held in fee or on lease. He knew an instance where a man occupied the whole area of one parish; and he paid a very considerable increase of rent to the landlord in consequence of the poor-rates upon the property being remarkably low. If the rates in some parishes were 2s. in the pound, and in others in the same union 4s. or 5s., it would reduce the value of property in the former, and increase it in the latter parishes, if they equalised the rates. And those who had taken leases and purchased property in parishes where the rates were low, would find that the Legislature 908 had made a serious alteration in the value of their estates. He would support the Motion for going into Committee, although he doubted whether the right hon. Gentleman would be able to pass his measure as it stood during the present Session.
§ CAPTAIN PECHELLthought, that under all the circumstances the right hen. Gentleman might fairly postpone the consideration of this Bill for the present Session. It appeared, that on the 12th of July, in the Court of Queen's Bench, Lord Chief Justice Denman differed entirely from the Attorney and Solicitor General as to the residence of five years. The hon. and gallant Member read the judgment of Lord Denman in the case "Regina v. the Inhabitants of Salford," in which it was laid down by the learned Judge that the pauper having been fifteen months in a prison not situated within the removing parish, a residence of five years within the meaning of the Act 9 and 10 Victoria, c. 66, was not made out, and a rule absolute was granted accordingly. If there was any doubt upon the point, now was the time for the Attorney or Solicitor General to clear it up. To show the effect of this Act, he would mention one case. Since it became law, 579 families, or 1,611 persons, not belonging to Brighton, had become chargeable to the parish. Of those, 1,562 had received relief at an increased weekly cost of 136l. 12s. 7d., as compared with the preceding year. Of the 1,611 persons who had become chargeable, only 126 could be properly fixed upon Brighton, as those persons had resided there five years without relief, and were consequently irremovable. Of the remaining 1,485, with the exception of the few whose parishes had agreed to reimburse the relief, the parish had submitted to the expense from motives of humanity rather than inflict the cruelty of removal upon the unfortunate poor. The House was now told by the right hon. Gentleman that the whole expense of these persons was to be thrown upon the union fund; and that the guardians were to levy a rate upon the basis of the county rate; and if they were not satisfied with the mode of valuation, they were to be empowered to order a fresh one; which latter provision, he thought, would be very objectionable. He was of opinion that there was an inconsistency in the Bill as regarded the exclusion of the universities, inns of court, and other extra-parochial places. He approved of private rates, which the right hon. Gentleman had condemned 909 in so signal a manner, and was sure that if a private rate had been established in the Andover union, such a report as had emanated from the Committee on the case of that union would never have been laid upon the table. It had been said that there was less agitation on the subject of the poor-law since the right hon. Gentleman (Mr. C. Buller) had assumed his present position; and it had been also said that the right hon. Gentleman had done nothing. He (Captain Pechell) wished, however, to give the right hon. Gentleman the benefit of his labours. When the late Commissioners went out of office—and they had been thrown out solely by the exertions of the Andover Union Committee, which had made a clearance of Somerset-house—and the right hon. Gentleman succeeded them, he found an order consolidating certain rules and regulations, which he confirmed; and of some of those rules he (Captain Pechell) much approved. The gallant Officer referred to several minor regulations adopted by the right hon. Gentleman, and concluded. He was willing to give the right hon. Gentleman his due share of praise for all that he had done since he had been in office; but with respect to the Bill before the House, he thought it ought to be delayed until another Session, for the question was of great importance, and there was not time to consider it.
MR. HENRY DRUMMONDagreed with the hon. Member for Oxfordshire, that this was a tinkering measure; but as that hon. Gentleman had not given a definition of what a "tinkering" measure was, he (Mr. Drummond) would endeavour to do so. He meant by "tinkering," a bad mending of a bad thing; and that, he thought, was a natural and inseparable part of the now poor-law system, and whether they got in the small end of the wedge or the large end of the wedge mattered not. The measure itself was bad from the beginning. It was a measure they had never been able to work, and the whole practice of it was directly in the teeth of the professions and statements that were made on proposing it. But he had never been, nor would he be now, a party to any agitation upon this or upon any other question. Say what they would of it, agitation was an appeal to men's passions when yon know you could not convince their reason. The repeal of the corn law was carried by agitation; and this very measure of the poor-law, which he very much disliked, was 910 produced by agitation. In this country, however much a law was disapproved of, efforts were made to carry it out honestly; but over the water, in the sister country, the rule was agitation—and no matter what law was passed, high and low, rich and poor, exerted their utmost ingenuity to drive a coach and six through it. As to the clearance system, to which the right hon. Gentleman had alluded, he had only heard of one such case, which he would not now name, in which a proprietor had, many years ago, pulled down the cottages on his estate. But, what proprietors certainly did not do was to build cottages at a dead loss; for it was perfectly impossible to build them in any way that should repay the outlay. There were well-managed parishes which had been stigmatised with the name of close parishes; but the system in them might be very advantageously compared with that which prevailed in other places called open parishes, where an individual or individuals ran up a few cottages, let them at an enormous rent to the poor, then supplied the inmates with goods—no matter of what quality—from their own shops, and finally sold up every article of furniture the poor people possessed. That was the open parish system; and now the Government were going to make the so-called close parishes pay the rates of the parishes in which paupers were so recklessly introduced. That was the avowed intention. The private rates which the right hon. Gentleman had stigmatised arose out of those circumstances. The great fault of the whole Somerset-house system was that they treated men like abstractions. They thought that all the poor were alike, and all labourers alike. That was what they did at Somerset-house, though. In all cases they spoke of the labourer as one fixed quantity. Now, if there were 100 labourers in a parish, ten of them perhaps were first-rate, and the remainder bad, arising in some cases from infinity, in others from age, or from other causes. What the hon. Member for Oxfordshire said was true, although it had been denied by the hon. Gentleman opposite, that on 10s. a week a man would support his wife and six children. If that man was thrown out of work, he went into the poorhouse. Yes; but there he was separated from his wife and children. There you came to abstractions again. Did not the House think that a man would do anything rather than submit to that? They talked of the workhouse test; but it was a 911 mercy for the farmers and gentlemen of the county to meet in the autumn and apportion out the work among them so as to keep the labourers out of the poorhouse. That was the reason for a private rate. Was it meant that it was of no advantage if the owners of land and farmers met together and said, "We will employ the poor, although at this time it is not profitable to us, and, to a certain extent, the labour is unproductive?" But in some cases it was not unproductive. If a man was employed at 10s. a week, and he kept his whole family upon those wages, but only gave the worth of 5s. a week in his work, it was surely a greater advantage than to send that man with his wife and six children to the poor-house, where they could not be supported for less than 2s. 6d. a day. The truth was that they had never been able to carry out the new poor-law practically and consistently; for the returns showed the great amount of outdoor relief that was granted. By this new poor-law they had dried up all the sources of private charity; and this effect of the law they were now going to increase. It was the interest of every gentleman to keep the poor around him, without exasperating them; without exacting from them rent they could not pay; and without putting them in the workhouse, which they abhorred; and so long as parishes could keep themselves clear, so long they would. But the moment they were joined to a neighbouring parish which was deluging the country with paupers, that became a hopeless case. He had 200 cottages, and he would give them to any one who would keep them in repair. As to the scheme of union rating, there was no intelligible principle in it. There was a principle in universal rating, but none in union rating, and they could not by talking substitute a no principle for a principle, even if a bad one. There being a principle in universal rating, he would, hating it as he did, vote for it at once, rather than go on in this way by degrees towards it. The advantage of the old system was, that all the people meeting together every Sunday at their parish church knew one another, knew their mutual distresses and wants, and could assist the overseers in detecting imposture. Moreover, the clergymen were by law the overseers and guardians of the poor, and they, he thought, had shamefully abandoned their charge in never demonstrating against the now poor-law as 912 they ought. They had abandoned the poor, and now the poor were abandoning them. But, instead of the feelings and principles which were bound up with the old system, it was now made a mere matter of geography, and it mattered not whether the compasses were struck in one place or another. Under the new state of things, there was no person in the union whose heart was drawn out towards the poor; and it was nothing but a vile system of money saving on one side, and of cheating on the other. He disliked this Bill very much; but if the right hon. Gentleman persisted in pressing it, he must go into Committee and endeavour to render the measure as good as it could be made.
MR. V. SMITHsaid, that the hon. Member who had just sat down, had, while deprecating agitation on any question, used the language and the terms of agitation as regarded what he had called the Somerset-house system of treating man as an abstraction. Whatever rules and regulations had been adopted in respect to the administration of the poor-law, Parliament were as responsible for as the Commissioners themselves. He (Mr. V. Smith) could not support the Motion of the hon. Member for Oxfordshire; for there were three or four principles contained in this Bill which were deserving of consideration in Committee. He would not say he did not entertain doubts with respect to some of them; but the whole subject was difficult and complicated, and required the most careful consideration. But, although he was not prepared to vote with the hon. Member for Oxfordshire, he was at the same time convinced that the Bill would not pass this Session; and, after the opinions which had been given by Gentlemen who were so well acquainted with rural affairs, he was almost disposed to recommend his right hon. Friend to withdraw the Bill for the present. For some five Sessions of Parliament the House had been attempting to deal with that important question, the law of settlement, but without producing any advantage, because, instead of grasping some great principle at once, they had been trying to effect their object bit by bit. Although he gave great credit to his right hon. Friend for his ability, and thought that his exertions had been of great utility, he still thought that the Bill now introduced was not of so ample and comprehensive a character as to be considered a final settlement of the question. There were four questions 913 which the discussion on the present Bill necessarily raised, and one of these was vagrancy; it certainly appeared to him, that throwing vagrancy on the unions did not meet the cases which it was necessary to meet in the manner in which it was desirable to meet them. This question of vagrancy was not perhaps so clear as it was generally supposed to be. If roads went through a parish, and vagrants frequented those roads, though the parish might suffer from the vagrants, it gained from the roads. He would put it to hon. Members to say, did not such a parish so circumstanced derive compensation from the existence of the roads, and on account of its position? A parish might suffer under the apparent ill-luck of having a railway running through it; but it had likewise many advantages from that circumstance. He thought that parochial tithes were burdensome, and that it would be much better to have their range extended over a wider area. Parochial tithes and parochial rates had the effect of preventing men being employed out of their own parishes; and such was the strength of this feeling that, generally speaking, the people at large were too ready to consider that the interests of the parish were the first thing to be attended to, and thus the employer was crippled in his operations, while the poor man found it difficult to obtain employment. From such causes resulted a slovenly mode of doing work, and insufficient payment even for inferior labour. Looking then both at tithes and payment for the poor, he should say that there ought to be a wider area of rate-ability; though he wished to see settlement put an end to, he by no means desired a national rate, because he thought that the effect of a national rate would be to remove all efficient supervision. As to the present measure, it could not be regarded otherwise than as a temporary matter; and even at best Ministers could hardly consider it one of great urgency, for they must be conscious that it could not pass in the present Session; and he hoped that in leaving it to a subsequent Session they would produce a Bill that would deal largely with the questions to which he had referred.
§ MR. BANKESsaid, whether or not Ministers thought proper to endeavour to proceed with the other stages of the Bill, it was a measure which could not pass in the present Session. The Bill was one of considerable importance as regarded the 914 ratepayers, but it was of much greater importance as regarded the poor, for it involved the question of the parochial care of the poor. In his opinion they would never arrive at a satisfactory result till they altered the size of the unions, and he thought the original Poor Law Commissioners were guilty of a great mistake in making so many of the unions most inconveniently large. Doubtless small parishes might be so combined as to render one union of not greater size than a large parish. On the present occasion he felt indisposed to press upon the attention of hon. Members any argument on the one side or the other, for he thought not only that the Bill ought not to pass in the present Session of Parliament, but that it ought not to be discussed in so thin a House as the present. Considering, then, the period of the Session, he must ask them should the Bill proceed further during the present year? Something had been said—indeed, much had been said on the subject of union rating—that was a largo question, and might lead to the still larger question of national rating; a species of rating which he did not hope the farmers and yeomanry would oppose. Of course, if there were to be a national rating there would he an attempt to subject funded property to the expense of maintaining the poor. Before he sat down he wished distinctly to say that he could not give his consent to the Poor Removal Act being made permanent. Now, at the end of two years, there did not appear the same utility in its provisions that there might have been in the first few months after it passed; at the same time, though he did not wish it to exist as a permanent measure, he did think it might be advantageously continued for another year, when the people in the towns would have had sufficient experience of it. He might further add, that the Bill appeared to him to create a very extraordinary tribunal, which might or might not act, and to which an appeal might or might not be brought. Against this part of the Bill he entertained very strong objections, and for the various reasons which he had stated, he should act with his hon. Friend the Member for Oxfordshire in case the Bill should get beyond the next stage. Debate again adjourned.