SECOND READING. (Hansard, 2 August 1862)

§ EARL RUSSELL
said, as it was understood that the discussion on this measure 1156 would be taken on Monday next, it would not be necessary for him to trouble their Lordships with any observations in moving the second reading. On Monday it was intended to move the suspension of the Standing Orders, with a view to passing the measure through its remaining stages. If, however, any objection was urged against that course, it would not be persevered in.

§ EARL FORTESCUE
said, be regretted much that unavoidable absence from town next Monday obliged him to take this, his only opportunity, of saying a few—and they should be very few—words in relation to this measure. He would not enter upon the general question, though there was much ground for comment in the truly admirable conduct of the operatives during the present distress; and still more in the strange doctrines now broached by some of the master manufacturers and their representatives—doctrines wonderfully at variance with those which he remembered to have been enunciated by them during the discussion on the Ten Hours Bill; when they stoutly maintained the expediency, if not the duty, of working tender women and children under age, for at least twelve hours a day; though it was found that this excessive toil seriously injured the health, and increased the mortality of both, while it prevented due attention being given to domestic duties by the women, and to education by the children. His main object in rising, however, was to complain of a series of speeches a few weeks ago imputed to a Poor Law Inspector specially sent down to the cotton manufacturing districts, apparently to supersede that far sounder and abler public officer, Mr. Mainwaring. He expressed a hope that they had not been correctly reported, because they appeared to tend to break down the distinction between legal relief and voluntary charity; between a compulsory tax and the freewill offerings of Christian benevolence; to acquiesce in the notion of outdoor relief in aid of wages, and to deprecate, if not denounce, the application of the labor test:—and this while the rates were far from having risen to the height they had done there in former periods of distress, and the sickness and the mortality—as he (Earl Fortescue) had ascertained yesterday at the Registrar General's Office—were in no case appreciably above, and in the average markedly below, what they had been in the same districts this time last year, 1157 while the mills were in full work. Such doctrines, emanating from an official quarter, would tend to render the Poor Law Board and its officers a source of weakness and embarrassment, instead of a stay and support to the local authorities in the delicate and difficult duty of administering relief in a time of distress. He repeated his hope that the speeches in question had not been correctly reported. He was sure that such a tone would not have been approved by either of the Presidents of the Poor Law Board, under whom he had had the honor to serve; and was calculated to raise great doubts as to the propriety of paying more than £60,000 a year for the maintenance of a board, in order that it might send down from the metropolis an inspector to speak what, to use an American phrase, was something very like bunkum.

§ LORD REDESDALE
said, he apprehended there would be no objection to the course proposed by the noble Earl. At the same time, it appeared to him inconvenient to have a Bill of such importance presented to them at such a period of the Session, and under such circumstances. Whatever objections their Lordships might entertain to its details, being a money Bill, they would be unable to alter it in any way.