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Among the economists of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Whately and Chalmers dealt quite extensively with the poor-law and the problems of poor-relief. Chalmers re-enforced his teachings in this matter by doing away with public relief of the poor in his parish, and providing for their care entirely through voluntary contributions. He believed that all public relief of the poor was bad; and, besides what is contained in his political economy, he wrote upon the subject at length in the three volumes which appear under the title of "The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns."

In the second quarter of the century the economists and philanthropists were destined to come into direct collision. They joined issues on two questions, and the victors in one case were vanquished in the other. Curiously enough, each party was defeated on the ground that seemed especially to belong to itself. The economists won in the fight for the reform of the poor-laws, and the philanthropists won in the fight for the protection of women and children in the mines and factories of England. The English economists in their contention for the limitation of the poor-law relief, and for a repeal of the corn-laws, rendered great services to English industry by simply abolishing governmental interference. It is not strange, therefore, that they should have been inclined to go to the extreme in thinking that government could never interfere without doing more harm than good.

The English poor-law, before its reform in 1834, is used by Francis A. Walker to point the moral that while "the legislator may think it hard that his power for good is so closely restricted, he has no reason, to complain of any limits upon his power for evil." Describing the operations of the act, Walker says: --

"All its details were unnecessarily bad. The condition of the person who threw himself flat upon public charity was better than that of the laborer who struggled on to preserve his manhood in self-support. The disposition to labor was cut up by the roots. All restraints upon increase of population disappeared under a premium upon births. Self-respect and social decency vanished before a money premium on bastardy."

Professor Senior was an active member of the commission of inquiry regarding the operations of the poor-law, and for some time the reports of the poor-law commission were written in line with the views of the economists. It was "while reviewing these reports that Carlyle characterized political economy as "the dismal science." He thus summarizes the teachings of the economists as evidenced in the reports: --

"Ours is a world requiring only to be well let alone. Scramble along, thou insane scramble of a world; thou art all right and shall scramble even so. And whoever in the press is trodden down has only to lie there and be trampled broad; such at bottom seems to be the chief social principle, if principle it have, which the poor-law amendment act has the merit of courageously asserting, in opposition to many things."

A similar view of the disastrous effects of the poor-law administration is expressed by Cunningham, who says: --

"It is impossible to overestimate the irreparable mischief which was done to Englishmen for many generations through the demoralizing influences exercised by some of the administrative methods then in use. The granting of allowances per child has been freely stigmatized as a mischievous stimulus to population; as a matter of fact, it was much worse; there is abundant evidence to show that it acted as a direct incentive to immorality. But the evil of the whole system was most patent from the various ways in which it conspired to render the inefficient pauper comfortable at the expense of the good work-man who tried to earn a living. The allowance must have had an extraordinary effect in diminishing the rate of wages and forcing men to depend upon supplementary payments out of rates; and an even worse mischief in some ways was the labor rate; by this system a rate-payer was obliged to employ a certain number of pauper laborers in accordance with his assessment and to pay them regular wages without reference to their work. An employer might thus be forced to dismiss good hands in order to give employment to inefficient paupers." (11)

It may be questioned, however, whether the earlier interpretation of the results of the poor-laws has not overlooked other factors of equal if not superior importance in the wretched condition of the English working-classes of this period. Marshall declares: --

"Year by year the condition of the working-classes in England became more gloomy: an astonishing series of bad harvests, a most exhausting war, a change in the methods of industry that dislocated old ties, combined with an injudicious poor-law to bring the working-classes into the greatest misery they have ever suffered, at all events since the beginning of trustworthy records of English social history." (12)