was too daring a speculation for the bad times
following the conclusion of peace. The necessary consequence was that
the competition of the workers among each other reached the highest point
of intensity, and wages fell to the minimum. So long as the old Poor Law
existed, the workers received relief from the rates; wages naturally fell
still lower, because the farmers forced the largest possible number of
labourers to claim relief. The higher poor-rate, necessitated by the
surplus population, was only increased by this measure, and the new Poor
Law, of which we shall have more to say later, was now enacted as a
remedy. But this did not improve matters. Wages did not rise, the
surplus population could not be got rid of, and the cruelty of the new
law did but serve to embitter the people to the utmost. Even the poor-
rate, which diminished at first after the passage of the new law,
attained its old height after a few years. Its only effect was that
whereas previously three to four million half paupers had existed, a
million of total paupers now appeared, and the rest, still half paupers,
merely went without relief. The poverty in the agricultural districts
has increased every year. The people live in the greatest want, whole
families must struggle along with 6, 7, or 8 shillings a week, and at
times have nothing. Let us hear a description of this population given
by a Liberal member of Parliament as early as 1830. {264}

"An English agricultural labourer and an English pauper, these words
are synonymous. His father was a pauper and his mother's milk
contained no nourishment. From his earliest childhood he had bad
food, and only half enough to still his hunger, and even yet he
undergoes the pangs of unsatisfied hunger almost all the time that he
is not asleep. He is half clad, and has not more fire than barely
suffices to cook his scanty meal. And so cold and damp are always at
home with him, and leave him only in fine weather. He is married, but
he knows nothing of the joys of the husband and father. His wife and
children, hungry, rarely warm, often ill and helpless, always careworn
and hopeless like himself, are naturally grasping, selfish, and
troublesome, and so, to use his own expression, he hates the sight of
them, and enters his cot only because it offers him a trifle more
shelter from rain and wind than a hedge. He must support his family,
though he canno