The Sun.
London, England, 1845-05-13 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY, MAY 13, 1845

In common with all who have directed their atten
tion to the mode of administering relief to the neces
sitous poor in Scotland, we have long entertained the
conviction that that system required very careful re-
vision. There is no feature more prominent, per-
haps, in the national character of the Scotch than
their charitable consideration for the claims of all
their indigent compatriots. When the administra-
tion of the funds contributed for so sacred a purpose,
under the influence of kindly feelings so generally
cherished, is found to be so defective as to leave
beyond the scope of its action a vast majority
of those whom it professed to reach, we may
safely conclude that the principles on which it is
based are essentially faulty. For this reason
we have been induced to
.watch, with much
solicitude, the discussions upon a measure lately
introduced into Parliament by the Lord Ad-
vocate, for amending the poor-law of Scotland.
On many accounts we have always been disposed to
consider that the principle of the existing law in
question was really good in itself; and that it might
have continued to operate beneficially, after making
all allowance for the altered condition of circum-
stances and relations which the increase of popula-
tion and the development of manufacturing capital
had produced within the last five-and-forty years—
had not its expansion been cramped and its
energy paralyzed by ill-judged attempts to adapt
their action to the requisitions of a harsher utilitarian
scheme of impracticable universality.
We believe it to be as likely that the differences of
genius, or sentiment, or usages subsisting between
different nations and races, demand corresponding dif-
ferences in the legislation to be provided for the relief
and management of their respective poor, as the dif-
ferences of their moral and social institutions. To
attempt establishing and working one :and the same
scheme of poor-law relief for England, Ireland, and
Scotland seems a fallacy so self-evident. But there
may be, on the other hand, inherent evils in such a
system intrinsically and universally demoralising and
destructive, and it is evident from the reports and com-
munications received from ministers of the kirk and
parochial authorities, that one such evil pervades
the existing poor-law of that country. If it was an
objection of insuperable gravity to the adminis-
tration of the English Poor Law, prior to 1833, that
under it a large proportion of the wages paid for
agriculturalmseuocthlamn do
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the
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sistence levied for the poor in virtue of the existing
law, by authorising the paupers to supplement the
wretched pittance doled out to them by begging from
door to door ! This permissive sanction does not go
' merely to encourage mendicant vagrancy, but it holds
out a premium to pauperism to relieve the legal fund
for its relief by throwing itself on those very sources
of irregular maintenance which it is the object of all
statutory enactments and police regulations on the
subject, in either countries, to cut oti.
From the statements of the Lord Advocate, on