The Scottish poor laws : their history, policy and operation / by Robert Peel Lamond.

  • Lamond, Robert Peel.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Scottish poor laws : their history, policy and operation / by Robert Peel Lamond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    Blit all such licensing and repressive enactments were more properly police regulations, and it was not till the reign of Elizabeth that the last and highest development took place. In that reign, amid the pressure of the pauperism caused by the cessation of feudal strifes and continental wars, by land going out of cultivation,^ by increasing population, by the growth of enclosiu’es, and by the rise of a separate labouring and trading class, the truth came to be recognised that men can live only by labour, or begging, or stealing. But employ- ment frequently failed and supplies of food fell short; stealing is immoral and is prohibited; begging is demoraliz- ing and socially inconvenient; and private charity proved, then as now, capricious, unsystematic, and ineflective. Hence systematic relief became, as it always becomes, a necessity in organized and civilized communities. The highest stasce in the evolution is reached when the cor- porate society, or the State, is found undertaking, as its corporate duty—no doubt from mixed motives of charity and self-interest—the burden of providing for the necessitous, and assuming those responsibilities towards tbem which groups had undertaken towards other more needy groups of individuals, and so rearing into positive law that which previously had only a moral sanction. The concrete result is the compulsory assessment. These positive enactments are, in England, the two celebrated statutes, the 14th and the 43rd of Elizabeth, and in Scotland the equally celebrated one-, modelled on them, of James VI. (1579, cap. 74), to be more particularly afterwards noticed. These are to this day the basis of the Poor Laws of England and Scotland. They, together with various amendments and moditications sue’- gested by experience which have been since enacted, are the evidences of what Burke calls “ the power of Government to provide for us in our necessities,” and it now remains for examination whether it has been “ a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it.” ^ This happened largely in the time of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, sheep grazing lieing substituted for it for the sake of the wool to encourage home manufactures.