page_title: Opposition to the English Poor Laws
section_title: Criticism of the Elizabethan Poor Law
hierarchical_section_title: Opposition to the English Poor Laws / Criticism of the Elizabethan Poor Law
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the British economist David Ricardo. Lent to the National portrait gallery by Christopher Ricardo, 2007. This painting shows Ricardo, aged 49 in 1821, just two years before his relatively early death.
context_page_description: From the reign of Elizabeth I until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 relief of the poor in England was administered on the basis of a Poor Law enacted in 1601. From the start of the nineteenth century the basic concept of providing poor relief was criticised as misguided by leading political economists and in southern agricultural counties the burden of poor-rates was felt to be excessive. Opposition to the Elizabethan Poor Law led to a Royal Commission on poor relief, which recommended that poor relief could not in the short term be abolished; however it should be curtailed, and administered on such terms that none but the desperate would claim it. Relief should only be administered in workhouses, whose inhabitants were to be confined, 'classified' and segregated. The Poor Law Amendment Act allowed these changes to be implemented by a Poor Law Commission largely unaccountable to Parliament. The Act was passed by large majorities in Parliament, but the regime it was intended to bring about was denounced by its critics as un-Christian, un-English, unconstitutional, and impracticable for the great manufacturing districts of Northern England.
context_section_description: Criticism of the Poor Law grew in the early nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars with France, especially among political economists.
  Thomas Malthus thought any benevolence to the poor was self-defeating; the only check on the numbers of the poor was poverty. Furthermore, the Poor Law gave a right to relief only in the parish where the claimant had a right of settlement, obtained by birth or by prolonged residence: it undesirably limited the mobility of labour. Without the Poor Law there would be "a few more instances of severe distress," but "the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present." However, he was one of the first to advocate so called 'indoor relief' in workhouses for the poor as opposed to outdoor relief (handouts in money or in kind, with recipients not under the control of poor-law authorities).
  David Ricardo supported the abolition of the Poor Law in his book 'Principles of Political Economy and Taxation' published in 1817. Any tax raised to pay for welfare such as poor rates reduced the money available to pay wages. He also argued that it rewarded laziness, discouraged people from saving for old age or illness, and encouraged irresponsibly large families.
  Edwin Chadwick, a member of the Royal Commission, and subsequently Secretary of the Poor Law Commission, was a follower of Jeremy Bentham  (who believed that wages would find their true levels in a free-market system where there was state control to maintain common agreed standards). Chadwick therefore criticized the Old Poor Law because its decentralised administration meant significant variation in the treatment of paupers.  Chadwick held that the able-bodied poor should be put to work in workhouses which met the condition of less eligibility: they could not claim outdoor relief as they did under the existing Poor Law. Conditions had to be worse than those for the poorest labourer outside the workhouse, so that people would not want to claim relief. This would decrease the poor rate, allow wages to rise to their true levels, and promote honest toil.
  "Every penny bestowed, that tends to render the condition of the pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer, is a bounty on indolence and vice." -1832 Royal Commission
caption: Ricardo argued that poor-rates reduced wages
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