The Sun.
London, England, 1861-06-29 00:00:00

THE LAW 01 SET ILEMENI.

The--present generation- of attorneys when they
look back through their fathers' bills of costs must
give wistful thoughts to the old Law of Settlement.
There were times not so very long ago when an old
bedridden pauper was worth £5OO to an active
firm ; when every removal was a certain lawsuit,
and the Quarter Sessions town was crowded with
witnesses from all parts of the kingdom. The plan
in those days was to fight everything, and to esta-
blish such a reputation for litigiousness that no
parish would lightly take the step of removing a
pauper to the territory of such a fierce neighbour.
Sessions were something then. They were not only
nurseries to the bar but ladders to the Solicitor-
Generalship. More of the poor rates were spent
in law than in bread. Settlement Law was a
labyrinth of the most inextricable entanglements,
but it was worth treading, for he who knew it well
passed through to fortune. Settlement Law had
its leading cases, and it had its memoria technica,
like Coke's Reports. Alas ! this is nearly all passed
away. There are few men of the present genera-
tion who know of Bott, or Const, or Caldecott.
There are even many leaders of Sessions to whom
that great decision which combined in itself the
poetry of the Settlement Law is all unknown. We
may be pardoned, perhaps, if we recall it before it
passes away for ever :

" A woman having settlement
" Married a man with none.
" The questim was—he being dead—
" If that she bad was gone.
" Quoth Sir John Pratt, ' her settlement
" Suspended did:remain
" ' Living the husband—but, him dead,
" It doth revive again.'
" Chorus of Puisne Judges—
"' Living the husband—but, him dead,
"' It doth revive again.' "

In those days all poor were removable, and the
duty of magistrates at Quarter Sessions was to ran-
sack all the life of some miserable old man until

they could fix his birth in some far away county,
or discover some hiring and service in some palish
where the ratepayers were not cautious to allow no
such expensive contracts. This was the old system
upon which lawyers flourished and paupers pined,
and poor-rates increased until they threatened to
swallow up rents.
Sir Robert Peel broke in upon this golden age
by ruthlessly sweeping away half the " learning"
of that fine-spun law. With an audacity which
startled the lawyers and even the country gentlemen
of the day he propcsed that a pauper—the most re-
movable and most perpetually moving animal in the
kingdom— should be " irremovable" after a five
years' residence in any parish. Henceforward
paupers were of two classes—the old inhabitants,
who had become irremovable by having struck a five
years old taproot into the parish, and the recent
corners, who had gained no such right, and might
be carried off to their places of settlement. This and
some other provisions have done a great deal to
break up the old sessions business, and settlement
cases are not much heard of now. Sir G. b. Lewis
yesterday was so adventurous in his heresy as to
wish that the Law of Settlement were entirely gone.
There is no limit to the revolutionary principles one
hears from the Treasury benches nowadays. Of
course, Mr. Cayley sees confiscation in the idea.
Mr. Henley was bold to prophesy that some daring
innovator might hereafter be found to demand that
there should be no removal at all, and that every
man should have a claim to relief in the union
where he had broken down at his work. Of course,
no one, we hope, would think of going to- such
dreadful lengths as this ! Mr. Villiers, when he
yesterday ventured to press a mild bill upon the
subject, certainly had no such audacity. He only
proposed that three years' residence, instead of five,
should give a poor man the privilege of being irre-
movable, and that for the purpose of maintaining
these irremovable poor the union should be the
parish. He suggested only that when parishes
have been thrown together for the purpose of
management they ought to remain together for
the purposes of settlements and ratings. Mr.
Villiers and :those members who supported him
in the debate thought that the fact of a dis-
trict having been marked out and constituted a
union because its area was thought a con-
venient area for management, was proof in itself
that it was a convenient area for rating. The very
fact of these Union divisions having been established
manifested a general consent that they are more
convenient than the fortuitous and unequal divisions
into parishes, which have no other recommendation
than that they are as old as Alfred. Even, however,
the recommendation of remote antiquity does not
apply ; for Poor-rates themselves are only referable
to the time when the Dissolution of the Monasteries
and the doctrines of the Reformation produced at
once the recognition of the duty and the political
necessity of a State provision for the helpless poor.
There is nothing respectable or venerable in the old
parochial system in its application to Poor-rates.
The ecclesiastical point of view is of an entirely dis-
tinct character. Parish poor- houses and parish
poor-rates have no association, except the tradition
of those fine old days when parishes kept up a war
of paupers.
We urge upon Parliament this bill on the grounds
of good local government and common sense, as a
piece of obviously proper legislation. But we also
urge it upon the ground of humanity. Gentlemen
may talk as they please about the venerable charac-
ter of the parochial system, but the only possible
practical objection to the alteration now proposed
is that it seems to tend in some way to abridge the
opportunities for those shifts and contrivances
whereby from time immemorial small dictrirta have
endeavoured to enjoy all the services of an able-
bodied labourer, and to cast his maintenance when
in decrepitude upon some other district. This is
obviously not only contrary to general policy and
general morality—so much, indeed, that criminal
statutes have been required to restrain it in
its excesses—but it has been the cause of great
suffering to the working classes. It is this which
has tended to crowd them together far away from
their work ; it is this which has rendered it the
policy of employers of labour to make their labourers
wtrrhhheiesni
sntyhhsaetbetlimtna
inooftns
surrounding
irremovable
poorrn ra 1
is parishesm ade
ttoh the a
of ftnhi
sec somes s
taosrnt
of
the
ao t
l hi
he
littler
et
town
t wi
os
wtn r
ni
pc
rt
and
0,
psro
es tot h9mra
set
parishes is met on the mllainanunptoenthcee of the
al
by evictions, removals' pulof t
ling down
nof
of the
ecottages,
t traugle•
and other devices for the extermination of popula-
tion. The war is as old as poor rates themselves,
and it has as many charms to
gen-
tlemen, and to some builders of first-classme uny
the old border warfare had to thoseeo w
themselves ill-used by another Union h . houses,tr
Tohteh thought t
majo-
rity yesterday of 187 to 44 in favour of the bill
leads us to hope that the House of Commons is
not prepared to step backwards towards the old
evils of the parochial system. There are, as Sir
Gr, C. Lewis said, " halting-places between a paro-
chialbut these halting places are not yet
and a national rate which we may prudently
and certainly the very moderate ad-
vance this measure proposes does not bring
,to a high road leading to a national rate.
reached, nen:ee: dnw
roles.

We learn by a letter from Havre that the con-
struction of a harbour of refuge between Calais and Bou-
logne has been decided on, and that plans of the work are
to be begun early next =nth.