The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-06-16 00:00:00

ledge they are—if he has grown a sullen, desperate
being, no longer husbanding his small means, no
longer cultivating his little patch of ground, or
,dcl to the comforts of his poor cottage,
we owe much of the change to that cruel kindness,
which has thrown in his way the temptations of the
ill-regulated beer-house, and the taint of bad

striving to a

coin pony.
What then is to be the position of this class under
our new policy ? He will have his daily food, we
are told, brought more within the reach of his
means. They are political economists forsoooth
who tell us this ! Why, it is contrary to every rule
of this vaunted science. The cost of labour is a
main ingredient in the'price of a quarter of corn ;
and if the price is reduced by foreign importations,
even assuming the same quantity as at present to
be grown at home, how is the present cost of labour
to be afforded by the grower? For a time, perhaps,
any great decline may be prevented, by the demand
for labour to carry on the improvements, to which
the farmer is driven; but, ultimately, this source of
employment most fail the labourer. To compete
successfully with his foreign rival, the native grower
must look to mor3 scientific and cheaper manage-
ment of his land; and, to do this, improved agri-
cultural implements, the adoption of improved fer-
tilizing materials, and the relinquishing of attempts
to raise grain upon soils, where its cultivation will
now have become unprofitable, is far more likely to
be his resource, than a more extensive permanent
employment of the labourer. Besides, we think we
showed successfully in our last that the certain re-
sult of our present policy must be the gradual
abolition of the small farm system, and the reduction
of the small farmer and his family to the level of,
perhaps the superior portion of, the labouring
masses. Here we have the elements of increased
competition for employment, which must inevitably
drive the least skilled and less active labourers out
of the field.

The manufacturer, however, will assure us that he
is ready to absorb the surplus labour of the agri-
cultural districts, in his factories and his workshops;
and Sir James Graham is preparing an alteration in
the Law of Settlement, to facilitate the absorbing
process. But the manufacturer never makes the
boast before his OWI4 workpeople, to whom, exclu-
sively, he has promised the benefits of that extension
of demand for labour, which is to arise from the
free importation of food; and the inhabitants of
the large towns are not at present very much
enlightened. with respect to the operation of the
measure of Sir James. Let us briefly examine the
latter.

Under the existing Law of Settlement, and in the
present state of society in the agricultural districts,
made up as it is of tenants of all classes, from the
mere cottier with his acre or half dozen acres, half
farmer and half labourer, to the farmer of 1000 or
150) acres, the surplus labourer in rural parishes is
provided for by employment in the inferior opera-
tions of agriculture, in highway work, &c., or is
paid for out of the poor's rate; thus, in either way,
creating a severe drain upon the rate-paying occu-
piers. Of the able-bodied portion of this surplus,
many migrate to other parishes, or to large towns;
but each remains still adscriptum glebe of the parish
where he has a settlement, and is liable to be sent
back in old age, or in periods of commercial stag-
nation, once more to be a burthen upon that parish.
Sir James Graham, however, proposes a new mode
of acquiring a settlement for such migrating
labourer, by a five years' industrial residence in any
parish or large town in which he may be able to
procure employment. The operation of such a
measure, in the changed social position of the
agricultural body, made up, as it shortly must
be, of large occcupiers, it is not difficult to
foresee. The surplus labourer will be encou-
raged, and provided with funds, to transfer his
labour to another market, or he may even be
coerced by the stringent administration of the new
Poor Law; and five years employment in any other
place will rid his place of settlement of their burthen
altogether. In the event of old age, or commercial
or manufacturing stagnation, the burthen of his
support will fall upon the place to which he has
been drawl], perhaps only for temporary purposes,
and without the prospect of permanent profitable
employment for his labour. Apply this Law of
Settlement to such places as Liverpool and Birken-
head. In both we have extensive works going on,
for which the labour of a class of men, different
from our ordinary population, is required. Five
years' employment in those works settles those men
and their families permanently upon the parishes of
Liverpool and Birkenhead. Under the operation of
such a law of settlement what must have become of
Stockport, Bolton, and other towns during the com-
mercial embarrassment of 1841 and 1842, filled as
those towns were with paupers from the southern
counties, whom the parochial authorities, acting
under the existing law, were enabled to send back
to their original settlement ?
This change will undoubtedly operate to raise
slightly the condition of the agricultural labourer in
his own parish ; but it cannot have any very exten-
sive operation, for the satisfactory reason that the
towns are not able to absorb any great portion of
agricultural labour, without reducing the value of
the labour of their own population, and thus taking
away the inducement to migrate. The labourer's
next resource it is not easy to arrive at. Emigration
possibly might be attempted; but the emigrants
must be of the small farmer class, or the superior
labourer's, whose removal from the soil would leave
upon it the melancholy spectacle of a population
consisting only of the moderately wealthy and the
miserably poor and dependent. The dangerous na-
ture of such a state of society history has sufficiently
shewn to the world.
It is clear that the Legislature ought to tell us what

is to be done with this valuable class of our indus-
trious population. They must neither be left to the
new-fangled theories of agricultural societies, with
their premiums for voluntary starvation, nor to the
tender mercies of experimentalizing philosophers.
We are told that their condition cannot be worse ;
what is that but telling us that it ought to be better ?
We might extend to their youth the blessings of a
sound system of parochial education. Make it com-
pulsory if you please. There can be no sound rea-
son, except the poverty of their parents, for sending
children, at six or seven years of age, into the fields
to pull turnips, or to weed corn,; for a penny a-day.
The State ought to take care that a future generation
of Englishmen and women are not brought up igno-
rant as the beasts they have to drive. 'We might
close the beer-shop against the parent, and undo
that fatal mistake in our past legislation, which has
oductive of misery and crime. We must,

been so

in mercy to the most uuprotected amongst our po-
pulation, relax the cruel pressure of the New Poor-

The Oddfellows are perhaps the most numerous
and important body, enrolled together for mutual
assurance, in Great Britain. On the Ist of January,
1846, they had 3884 lodges in 386 districts, and
their members numbered 259,374. The amount of
good within such a body as this, if their affairs were
conducted upon a right principle, is almost incal-
culable. A quarter of a million of families are here
apparently provided for in the contingencies of the
sickness or the death of their heads; and as there
are almost innumerable other societies established
with the same beneficial object, it becomes of incal-
culable importance to ascertain the basis of the
calculation on which the promises held out by many
of these societies are based.

For a yearly payment of £1 2s. pd., including
entrance money, the following benefits are promised
to a man aged 32 :
£0 10 0 per week during sickness,
0 0 at the death of a member,
..£5 0 0 at the death of his wife.

To enable any society to fulfil these promises, it is
clear that there ought to be an ample margin ; and
that the contingencies to which the assured are
liable should be estimated rather over than under
the scale, which has been drawn from our experi-
ence of vital statistics. Mr. Neison, in the able
work to which we referred in our last, has laid down
the following table, showing the expectation of life
at the same ages amongst the males of three dis-
districts, and for all classes in England and Wales :