The Sun.
London, England, 1831-01-07 00:00:00

order o; the Board of Agriculture, which ex-
hibits the melancholy consequences to the poor
of these proceedings ;
" In the year Idoo (says the Report) a journey
was made of about 1,600 miles, in which the effect
of inclosing on the spot where the inclosures had
taken place was examined, without trunting to the
reports of the poor only 3 but of the clergy, farmers,
and es en commissioners, who had been employed;
and it appeared, that in many cares the poor had
in:questionably been injured. In sonic coves many
Icows had been kept without a legal right, and no-
thing given for the practice. In other 'cases where
alktmenta were assigned, the cottagers could not
pay the expence of the measure, and were forced to
sell their allotments. The Brea: loss of the poor is
the loss of fuel, where long: custom has prevails d.
In other caies they kept cows by right of hiring
their cottages on common-rights, and the land going
of course to the proprietor, was added to the farms,
and the poor sold their cows: this is a very com-
mon case. The causes were in this manner various,
but the result the same. The Board will observe
that these injuries in fret, though not in legal right,
are not mentioned to show that such inclosures
should not have nil:en place, nor to assert that an
increase of regular employment by the cultivation of
the farmers might not more than make amends for
them, which is another question ; but to state the
facts really as they are ln Decem-
ber of the same year (1800) a Committee of the
House of Commons sat on the high price of provi-
sions; the Right lion. Dudley Ryder in the Chair.
By their orders letters were sent to the 1,845
parishes and places that had been inclosed during
the first forty years of his present Majesty. The
object was to ascertain the increase or decrease of
the culture of wheat ; but the Clergy, in their
answers (1,384 in number), adverted to various
other circumstances, and a few of them to this point
—of the effect cf the enclosures on the interests of
the poor. In twenty-nine cases out of thirty-one
noted, the poor, in the opinion of the Ministers,
were sufferers by losing their cows and other stock.
There does not appear to be anything done illegally
in any of these cases : in some instances the poor
had no right to keep stock on the commons ; these
are all cases which the lawyers term usurpation ;
and in others allotments were assigned them; but
as they were unable to be at the expence of the en-
closure it forced them not only to sell their cows,
but their horses also. This is a very hard case,
though a legal one; and as instances are not want-
ing of a much more humane conduct, it is to be la-
mented that the same motives did not operate on all."
The poors'-rates increased rapidly on the
division of commons. The details in Appendix
No. IV. of this Report are distressing in the
extreme. " Mr. Forster, of Norwich, after
giving an account of twenty enclosures in which
he had acted as a Commissioner, stated his
opinion on their general effect on the poor, and
lamented that he had been accessary to injuring
two thousand poor people, at the rate of twenty
families per parish."
Thus we have seen the Legislature systema-
tically stripping the poor of their little posses-
sions, whence they supported themselves when
out of work, depriving them of their accustomed
fuel, taxing coals, that employment might be
driven to the north, and placing them in a des-
titute condition at the mercy of the owners and
occupiers of land. We have seen the Magis-
trates and farmers next availing themselves of
the machinery of the Poor Laws to degrade
them still further, and prevent them ever retain-
ing or acquiring property. They were sunk in
the lowest wrttchedness. But they began to
give signs of life. We have yet hopes of them,
ough they require to be assisted.

AN APPEAL TO THE JUSTICE OF HIS JUDGES AND
HIS COUNTRY FROM AN AGRICULTURAL LA-
BOURER ON HIS TRIAL AT SALISBURY FOR MA-
CIIINE-BREAKING.
Lo pleld guilty to the charge of which I
un act-used. But I humbly beg to urge the following
circumstances in extenuation of my offence :—My Lords,
I have long felt that the share which, as a labourer, I have
received of the produce of my labour, was less than in
fairness it should have been, less than it was worth to those
who purchased it. I have been so assured by many re-
spectable and well informed neighbours who compassionated
the pitiable situation from which, with the utmost efforts
of industry, I could not escape. I have been told that
this is neither the natural or necessary condition of tkc
labourer; and that if a Government acted with wisdom
in the interest of the people, for whose good it is
appointed, such a state of things could not exist.' All
I have desired is to he enabled to earn a decent main-
tenance by honest industry ; but this privilege has been
denied me. lam told that in other countries, in America,
in Canada, in New South Wa'es—a day labourer can earn
ten times as much as is necessary to maintain him. Hsi,
why am I not allowed to go there? True, my poverty
prevents my paying the expences of the passage. But
there is wealth enough in the country to pay them.
Should not•the Government which spends so many mil-
lion% a year professedly fur the people's happiness, expend
something to preserve me, and such as I am, from ex-
treme distress? The law which protects property, pre-
vents me from helping myself to the means of removal to
those happy countries. Surely the law ought to provide
me with those means. The law now confines me in this
country, where the legal owners of wealth make a profit
of my misery, by hiring my labour for the bare pittance
which can keep me alive; and the same law stops me at
every point from bettering my condition by my own efforts.
The law then is not made for me. It gives some persons
a property in my wretchedness. But it gives me nothing.
The law regards not ins. Is it wonderful I should disre-
gard the law ?
But I am told that I ;on indebted to the benevolence
of the law for a provision against want. My Lords, it is
the mode in which this benevolent law is administered by
the legal authorities that has brought me into the un-
happy position in which I now stand. lam unmarried;
and, for this reason alone, during nearly one half of the
year, I am refused all employment by the farmers of my
neighbourhood. They prefer the men with large families,
because, as they truly say, they must keep them, and
whatever wages they pay them go to save the poor rate ;
whereas, if they employed me, the same wages would be
far more than I can claim from that rate, and by not doing
so, they save that difference.
My Lords, I humbly beg to represent that the diffe-
rence which they save, as employers and rate-payers, I
lose. lum prevented, through no fault of my own, but
' solely through my being unburdened with a fatni:y,
from earning fair wages in an industrious employ-
ment, and driven to apply to the overseer to save
me from starvation. The overseer sends me to work
for those very farmers who refused to employ me
voluntarily—to work, on their farms and for their
profit, at a rate of pay of 6d. a day. My natural sense
of justice revolts at being required to do the same work
for sixpence, for which other and weaker men than myself,
working by my side, receive two shillings, because they
have a wife and family, The overseer takes me before a
Magistrate fur not doing as much work as the man who
receives four times as much pay as myself ; and the Magi-
strate cotmnits me to gaol. Thus in every way I feel the
severity of the law, while its protection is is every way
denied to me. Once more, I ask, is it wonderful that the
law fails in obtaining my respect?
But I have been informed that the making up from the
poor-rate the wages of farmers' labourers, to which prac-
tice is owing their refusal to employ me, with all the cruel
consequences I have described, is itself illegal ; that, in
truth, neither overseers have the power to wake, nor Ma-
gistrates to order, any payments to able-bodied labourers
already in full work fur private individuals, and conse-
quently that I have been deprived of the opportunity of
earning fair wages, not by the law, but by its abuse and
infraction. My Lords, if this be so, am I alone to suffer for
breaking the law? Are those who have not only broken
' the law, hut, by doing so, have driven me to disregard
and break it, to escape all punishment, all blame, even all
notice?
It cannot be urged that their motives were charity to
the men with large families. It could make no difference
to them whether they were paid their parish allowance by
the parish alone, or partly by the parish and partly by the
farmers. The object of the farmers and overseers who
contrived the practice was, as I hare said, to save the dif-
' rence between the wages I should have received as a
farmer's labourer, and the pittance I did receive as a parish
pauper—to take this difference from me, and put it into
their own pockets. I will not presume to say the Magistrates