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The town is entirely free from strife, discord or disturbance. In the county of Tyrone, Ireland, no drinking house is allowed. In 1870, Right Hon. Claude Hamilton said: "At present there is not a single policeman in that district. The poor-rates are half what they were before, and the magistrates testify to the great absence of crime."
I have here an analysis of the poor-rates collected in Manchester during the last four years, and I will briefly state the results to the House. In the year 1845 the amount of rates collected expressly for the relief of the casual Irish poor was 3,500l.
If the town were so well paved and so well lighted, if half-a-dozen squalid lanes had been transformed into a stately street, if half the town no longer depended on tanks for their water, if the poor-rates were reduced one-third, praise to the brisk new blood which Richard Avenel had infused into vestry and corporation. And his example itself was so contagious!
Not a strike takes place, but immediately the workmen are plunged in destitution; their furniture and watches are sent to the pawnshop, whilst deplorable appeals are made to the charitable, and numerous families are cast upon the poor-rates. This habitual improvidence though of course there are many admirable exceptions is the real cause of the social degradation of the artizan.
Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the people here to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen of Launceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago to 'the new gospel of fertility. When will North Devon awake?
You just go down to the farm and burn they stacks over the old rascal's head; and then they that let you starve now, will be forced to keep you then. If you can't get your share of the poor-rates, try the county-rates, my bucks you can get fat on them at the Queen's expense and that's more than you'll do in ever a Union as I hear on. Who'll come down and pull the farm about the folks' ears?
'And upon my very deed, Rowland, if this isn't too bad, cried the farmer, stamping his foot on the floor, and instantaneously swelling with passion. 'As if it wasn't enough to have paupers, and poor-rates, and sick and dying, bothering one all day long, without your bringing an Irish beggar into the house. I never saw such an 'ooman as your mother in my life; she's never quiet a minute.
Colquhoun counts the annual revenue of various charitable institutions at £445,000, besides which the endowments produced £150,000, and the poor-rates £255,000. Among these a considerable number were intended to promote education. Here, as in some other cases, it seems that people at the end of the century were often taking up an impulse given a century before.
The Poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates. The changes produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could.
All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates." So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I came to know personally the doer of it.
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