s of
relaxation; a father is negligent of his children, the children do not
think it necessary to contribute to the support of their parents;
the employer and employed are engaged in personal quarrels; and the
pauper, always relieved, is always discontented. Crime advances with
increasing boldness; and the parts of the country where this system
prevails are, in spite of our gaols and our laws, filled with poachers
and thieves.' Mr. Hodges, chairman of the West Kent quarter sessions,
in his evidence before the emigration committee, said, 'Formerly,
working people usually stayed in service till they were twenty-five,
thirty, and thirty-five years of age, before they married; whereas
they now married frequently under age. Formerly, these persons
had saved 40 l. and 50 l. before they married, and they were never
burdensome to the parish; now, they have not saved a shilling before
their marriage, and become immediately burdensome.'

The farmers were not so discontented with this allowance system as
might be supposed, because a great part of the burden was cast upon
other shoulders. The tax was laid indiscrimately upon all fixed
property; so that the occupiers of villas, shopkeepers, merchants, and
others who did not employ labourers, had to pay a portion of the wages
for those that did. The farmers were in this way led to encourage a
system which fraudently imposed a heavy burden upon others, and which,
by degrading the labourers, and multiplying their numbers beyond the
real demand for them, must, if allowed to run its full course, have
ultimately overspread the whole country with the most abject poverty
and wretchedness.

There was another interest created which tended to increase the evil.
In the counties of Suffolk, Sussex, Kent, and generally through
all the south of England, relief was given in the shape of house
accommodation, or free dwellings for the poor. The parish officers
were in the habit of paying the rent of the cottages; the rent was
therefore high and sure, and consequently persons who had small pieces
of ground were induced to cover them with those buildings. On this
subject Mr. Hodges, the gentleman already referred to, remarks: 'I
cannot forbear urging again that any measure having for its object the
relief of the parishes from their over population, must of necessity
become perfectly useless, unless the act of parliament contains some
regulations with respect to the erecting and maintaining of cottage