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Mr. Canning was once asked by Mr. Tierney why he did not touch the Poor Law? To which question Mr. Canning replied:—'' "Why do not Governments decide offhand a question growing out of the usages of centuries—interwoven with the habits, and deeply rooted in the prejudices of the people? Of all subjects of legislation on which Governments ought not harshly or prematurely to interfere, without ascertaining, and, if possible, carrying with them the prevailing sentiments of the country, this of the Poor Law appears to me the one on which it would be most undesirable to take a precipitate course.''" From the reign of Elizabeth 1 until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 relief of the poor in England was administered on the basis of a Poor Law enacted in 1601. From the start of the nineteenth century the basic concept of providing poor relief was criticised as misguided by leading political economists and in southern agricultural counties the burden of poor-rates was felt to be excessive (especially where poor-rates were used to supplement low wages (the 'allowance' or Speenhamland system))). Opposition to the Elizabethan Poor Law led to a Royal Commission on poor relief, which recommended that poor relief could not in the short term be abolished; however it should be curtailed, and administered on such terms that none but the desperate would claim it. Relief should only be administered in workhouses, whose inhabitants were to be confined, 'classified' (men, women, boys, girls) and segregated. The Poor Law Amendment Act allowed these changes to be implemented by a Poor Law Commission largely unaccountable to Parliament. The Act was passed by large majorities in Parliament, but the regime it was intended to bring about was denounced by its critics as (variously) un-Christian, un-English, unconstitutional, and impracticable for the great manufacturing districts of Northern England. The Act itself did not introduce the regime, but introduced a framework by which it might easily be brought in. Opposition to the New Poor Law strictly speaking was resistance to the introduction of the New Poor Law administrative framework; this was chiefly encountered in the industrial North in 1837–9 and overcome after a few riots by a judicious mixture of legal threats and deployment of the military. Opposition to the New Poor Law in the looser sense of resistance to (and criticism of) key features of the regime recommended by the Royal Commission persisted and eventually became orthodoxy: for example outdoor relief was never abolished in much of the industrial North. When a prominent West Riding opponent of the New Poor Law died in 1858, the Huddersfield Chronicle wrote "..the controversy closed and English common sense has settled down on the poor-law question somewhat nearer to the views of Oastler and Pitkethly than those of their opponents." ==Criticism of the Elizabethan Poor Law== Criticism of the Poor Law grew in the early nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars with France, especially among political economists. Thomas Malthus thought any benevolence to the poor was self-defeating; the only check on the numbers of the poor was poverty. Furthermore, the Poor Law gave a right to relief only in the parish where the claimant had a right of settlement, obtained by birth or by prolonged residence: it undesirably limited the mobility of labour. Without the Poor Law there would be "a few more instances of severe distress," but "the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present." However, he was one of the first to advocate so called 'indoor relief' in workhouses for the poor as opposed to outdoor relief (handouts in money or in kind, with recipients not under the control of poor-law authorities). David Ricardo supported the abolition of the Poor Law in his book 'Principles of Political Economy and Taxation' published in 1817. Any tax raised to pay for welfare such as poor rates reduced the money available to pay wages. He also argued that it rewarded laziness, discouraged people from saving for old age or illness, and encouraged irresponsibly large families.〔(Andrew Roberts, "Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law: The Theories that Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Owen made", Social science history for budding theorists. Middlesex University. )〕 Edwin Chadwick, a member of the Royal Commission, and subsequently Secretary of the Poor Law Commission, was a follower of Jeremy Bentham (who believed that wages would find their true levels in a free-market system where there was state control to maintain common agreed standards). Chadwick therefore criticized the Old Poor Law because its decentralised administration meant significant variation in the treatment of paupers. Chadwick held that the able-bodied poor should be put to work in workhouses which met the condition of less eligibility: they could not claim outdoor relief as they did under the existing Poor Law. Conditions had to be worse than those for the poorest labourer outside the workhouse, so that people would not want to claim relief. This would decrease the poor rate, allow wages to rise to their true levels, and promote honest toil. "Every penny bestowed, that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer, is a bounty on indolence and vice." -1832 Royal Commission〔( George R. Boyer, ''An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750-1850,'' Cambridge University Press (1990) ISBN 0-521-36479-5 Quoting ''Parliamentary Papers'' 1834, p. 228. )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Opposition to the English Poor Laws」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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