United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Lowe, whom the gentleman has cited, says, that nobody supposes that the three great staples of English manufactures, cotton, woollen, and hardware, are benefited by any existing protecting duties; and that one object of all these protecting laws is usually overlooked, and that is, that they have been intended to reconcile the various interests to taxation; the corn law, for example, being designed as some equivalent to the agricultural interest for the burden of tithes and of poor-rates.
But what were they doing with the money they earned? Were they saving it for a rainy day; or, when the "roaring times" no longer existed, were they preparing to fall back upon the poor-rates? He found that in one case a man, with his two sons, was earning seven pounds in a fortnight.
Nevertheless, before the Turks so fleeced the inhabitants, I question if there were any poor person ever likely to die of starvation, for the rich members of families provide for the poor, and rich friends for poor friends, and each faction for the poor of the faction, although no poor-rates are levied.
A man may pay his tithes to the rector, and his church-rates to repair God's house, and his poor-rates to maintain God's poor, all very regularly, and yet be a very bad member of Christ's Church. These payments are all right and good; but they are but the outside, the letter of what God requires of him. No!
There are more good hides buried in the States, black and white, every year, than would pay the poor-rates and state-taxes. They make excellent huntin'-coats, and would make beautiful razor-straps, bindin' for books, and such like things; it would make a noble export. Tannin' in hemlock bark cures the horrid nigger flavour.
We spend in Ireland upwards of £1,000,000 a-year in poor-rates, and I do not believe that if enquiry were made it would be found that any productive works were the result." So much the worse; and it was one of the great objections to the Irish Poor-law system, that under it no provision was made for the profitable employment of able-bodied paupers.
We consider that no extraordinary rate, and it is monstrous, they say, 'that the accumulated wealth of years in the county of Lancashire should not more largely contribute to the relief of its own distress. I will not enter into an argument as to how far the larger amount of wages in the manufacturing districts may balance the smaller amount of wages and the larger amount of poor-rates in the agricultural districts.
There's no room for both of us; he has come too near; he must pay the penalty of his miscalculation. Is there not the workhouse for such people?" And Will went about repeating to himself. "There's the workhouse don't I pay poor-rates? the workhouse is an admirable institution." He lay awake many an hour of these winter nights, seeing in vision his own life and the life of man.
What I am now about to set down may be wearisome, but it is not episodical; and I promise that it shall be the last didactic conversation in the work. One day Maltravers was relating to De Montaigne all that he had been planning at Burleigh for the improvement of his peasantry, and all his theories respecting Labour-Schools and Poor-rates, when De Montaigne abruptly turned round, and said,
My sixty thousand acres, which are not diamondiferous, will very soon be worth as much as sixty thousand English acres, say two pounds the acre per annum. That is under the mark, because in Africa the land is not burdened with poor-rates, tithes, and all the other iniquities that crush the English land-owner, as I know to my cost. But that is not all, sir.
Word Of The Day