" The
objection was not unfounded; but the system of which it complains was
too one-sided to be long maintained, and in less than ten years a great
financial reform had swept away the great mass of import duties, and so
far had placed the Indian manufacturer on the same level with his
fellow-subjects of English blood.
The disturbances which agitated the first years of the reign of William
IV. were not caused solely by the excitement attendant on the passing of
the Reform Bill. There had been extensive agricultural distress in
England, which had shown itself in an outbreak of new crimes, the
burning of ricks in the farm-yards, and the destruction of machinery, to
which the peasantry were persuaded by designing demagogues to attribute
the scarcity of employment. But statesmen of both parties were agreed in
believing that a great deal of the poverty which, especially in the
agricultural counties, had become the normal condition of the laborer,
might be ascribed to the pernicious working of the Poor-law, which
subsisted with scarcely any alteration as it had been originally enacted
in the reign of Elizabeth. There was even reason to doubt whether the
slight changes which had been made had been improvements. If they had
been in the direction of increased liberality to the poor man who needed
parish relief, and had to some extent lessened his discomforts, they had
at the same time tended greatly to demoralize both him and his employer,
by introducing a system of out-door relief, which, coupled with the
practice of regarding such relief as a legitimate addition to wages, led
the former to feel no shame at underpaying his workmen, and the workman
to feel no shame at depending on the parish for a portion of his means
of subsistence.
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