g classes were finally committed to a new bondage,
when they had freed themselves from the serfdom of feudalism, and when
the control exercised over them by the gild and municipality was
relaxed. The statute was so enforced that to earn a year's livelihood
would have taken a labourer not 52 weeks, but sometimes two years, or 58
weeks, or 80 weeks, or 72 weeks; sometimes, however, less--48 or 35. It
followed that on such a system the country could only with the utmost
good fortune free itself from the economic difficulties of the century,
and that the need of a poor-law was felt the more as these difficulties
persisted. A voluntary or a municipal system could not suffice, even as
a palliative, while such statutes as these were in force to render
labour immobile and unprogressive. Also, while wages were fixed by
statute or order, whether chiefly in the interest of the employers or
not, obviously any shortage on the wages had to be made good by the
community. The community, by fixing the wages to be earned in a
livelihood, made itself responsible for their sufficiency. And it is
suggestive to find that in the year in which the Artificers and
Labourers Act (1563) was passed, the act for the enforcement of
assessments of poor-rate (5 Eliz. cap. 3) was also enacted. The Law of
Settlement, to which we have referred, passed in the reign of Charles
II., was due, it is said, to a migration of labourers southward from
counties where less favourable statutory wages prevailed; but it was, in
fact, only a corollary of the Artificers and Labourers Act of 1563 and
the Poor Relief Act of 1601. These laws, it may be said, were the means
of making the English labourer, until the poor-law reform of 1834, a
settled but landless serf, supported by a fixed wage and a state bounty.
By the poor-law it was possible to continue this state of things till,
in consequence of an absolute economic breakdown, there was no
alternative but reform.

The philanthropic nature of the poor-law is indicated by its
antecedents: once enacted, its bounties became a right; its philanthropy
disappeared in a quasi-legal claim. Its object was to relieve the poor
by home industries, apprentice children, and provide necessary relief to
the poor unable to work. The act was commonly interpreted so as to
include the whole of that indefinite class, the "poor"; by a better and
more rigid interpretation it was, at least in the 19th century, held to
apply only to the "destitu