The Sun.
London, England, 1845-06-23 00:00:00

Tim
^4

LONDON, MONDAY, JUNE 23, 1845.

So long as the New Poor-law shall be administered,
in respect of cases not specifically provided for by the
Acts last passed for its amendment--(and which cases,
of course, must always form the vast majority of the ob-
jects to which it is practically applied)—on principles
not compatible either with common sense er common
humanity—so long will it prove an unfailing source of
suffering, discontent, and resentment to the pauper com-
munity whom it is its confessed object to succour ; and
of invidious administration and personal unpopularity to
all concerned in its administration. No man doubts for
a moment the necessity for a law to provide for the main-
tenance of the destitute poor, whose destitution is not the
result of their indolence, wilful misconduct, or acts of moral
or legal criminality. No man doubts for a moment that
destitution, not the result of these causes, has a just
claim for relief upon the more fortunate classes of his
fellow-countrymen. And it is equally little a matter of
doubt, that the vast—indeed, the enormous—funds
annually assessed for the purposes of such relief, should
be faithfully and economically administered by responsi-
ble officers, on a well-organised and intelligible scheme
of management. But it is the peculiar misfortune of
the New Poor Law that all its executive officers appear
to imagine that they are administering some immutable
edict of the Medes and Persians, the decrees of which
may neither be detracted from nor added to by a single
syllable, however unlooked-for and unthought-of the
particular exigency which may demand their modifica-
tion in practically dealing with them. It has always ap-
peared to us, that magistrates, boards of guardians, and
relieving officers exhibit, in nine cases out often, where
any circumstances attach to a pauper case before them
that may happen to be thus removed beyond the
apparent scope, or of the express enactments of the
statute, an utter paralysis of the faculties of common
sense and clear judgment. They seem to ima-
gine that they have no discretion whatever beyond
or within the letter of the statute, and fall into a sort of
abject despair, or an apathetic indifference about any
degree of hardship, cruelty-, or injustice which their
servile compliance with that letter may cause them to
inflict. There is scarcely one of her MAJESTY'S subjects
who does not, at least twice in twenty-four hours, con-
travene, without hesitation, some positive law
or other, about the breach of which he
gives himself no trouble, being sensible that,
could the Legislature have foreseen how such
law would operate to work a grievance to him, in con-
nexion with matters indifferent in themselves, it would
never have passed it. By reasonable analogy these func-
tionaries might surely suppose that they would be at
liberty to act, where the exigency of the case demanded
prompt and effectual relief, in the spirit with which alone
any system of poor•law relief can have been projected
and accomplished, however the letter of the law embody-
ing it might have omitted to prescribe a specific course
to be adopted in such specific case. If it be a sound
maxim that lex neminem cogit ad " impossibik," it is
surely as sound a one, that" lex neminem ad crudele cogit."

A most extraordinary case appeared last week
in the columns of a contemporary, which will be
found fully to bear out these observations. It
is the more remarkable, moreover, inasmuch as the
communication, although an anonymous one, is stated to
be made on the authority of a magistrate, who declares
his reason for bringing such facts before the public in
such a shape to be, that he knows very well if he were
to move the grant of the relief which the case he nar-
rates imperatively calls fur, " he should be outvoted at
the Board of Guardians." So that here is a magistrate
and a member of a Board of Guardians, so worked upon
by this species of unworthy weakness, that he is afraid to
move his own proposition to a board of which he is a
member, because the fear of the Commissioners of
Somerset House and their rescripts is ever before its
eyes. Here is a magist"ate who, having a case of sin-
gular harshness and inhumanity, occurring within his
own cognizance, to urge against the administration of
the poor-law, resorts to the vicarious aid of a
newspaper, in order to make known those facts,
and his opinions upon them, which might have
been so much more impressively given by him from the
bench. It seems that in the Har.iwick (near Reading)
union, at the board of which this magistrate acts, there
dwells one WILLIAM WELLER, of the parish of Whit-
church, in the county of Oxford,—that he is between
80 and 70 years of age, and has been confined to his
home for these last five weeks with a bad leg. The
doctor in attendance upon him, and humanely so attend-
ing without any union order, gave a note to WELLER'S
wife to take to the relieving-officer, stating that the man
was very poor,- and being in this dangerous state required
to have better and more nourishing food allowed to him,
This C 639 was brought before the board, who refused