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448 Life of Books, –with Remarks.
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"not be perceived amidst their plenty; that they bestow with a good intention, which will not always be frustrated; since, if their bounty will be often distributed in vain, it will sometimes assist to chear the drooping soul of undissembling indigence; and that their recompence will be the blessing of him who is ready to perish and the consciousness of having endeavored humbly to imitate the universal beneficence of that Providence, whose mercies are over all his works, and who dispenses his rain and his sun-shine in common to the good and to the evil."-So far this benevolent writer, who throughout his whole performance has recommended the doctrine of universal charity with equal energy and good intention; and yet it may be doubted, whether that indiscriminate charity, which from the example of supreme wisdom, he endeavors to diffuse, may be ranked among the virtues that entitle men to that great and God-like character of being the Friend of the Poor. 

If to encourage vice be scarcely less criminal than to practise it, and if it be granted, what I believe no man will venture to deny, that by far the greater part of those vagrants who crave subsistence from door to door, infest our streets, or wander from place to place to move compassion, are loose in their morals, dissolute in their lives, and of evil example to others, What do we by extending our charity indiscriminately to these abandoned wretches, but contribute to increase an evil which all good men ardently wish to abolish? If it were better, as our author seems to intimate, that a thousand of these infamous profligates should be relieved, than that one object of real distress should be neglected, then it will follow, that it were better that a thousand rogues escape punishment, than that one honest man should suffer wrongfully; a position fraught with many evils to a community, and leading to an universal corruption of manners among its members.

But while our author is thus favourable to the miserable race of vagrants, whose pitiable case he pathetically deplores, he seems far less indulgent to the frailties of those with whom the power of regulating and relieving them is intrusted by the laws. In cases of distress, he justly observes, that the sufferer's natural and legal application is to the parish- officer; but, adds he, "the parish officer, perhaps from na-

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tive obduracy, perhaps from inattention, and perhaps from private pique, refuses to relieve, and the complainant’s dernier resort is to the magistrate; the remedy, however, is worse than the disease, To summon the Overseer before the Justice, is to commit an insult for which pardon must never be expected. The word of a wealthy farmer or tradesman is of greater validity than the oath of a friendless mendicant, who is represented as neither needing nor meriting assistance, consequently dismissed, to nakedness and hunger, with an abusive joke or aggravating reprimand.” This is a heavy charge; and, as it is general, cannot safely be refuted: to say that no such instance ever happened, would, perhaps, be presuming too far upon the humanity and moderation of Overseers and Justices of the Peace; but that it is a common case, that a deserving object meets with such severe treatment
from both the Officer and Justice, the
duty of the one, and the respectable
character of the other, will not permit us to suppose.

This kind of declamation, therefore, if it is without proof, is equally
unjustifiable and uncandid. Parish officers, of the ablest heads, and the best hearts, have, generally speaking, a hard task so to behave as to give content to those who pay, and those who receive. It is no wonder, that men of tender feelings are as cautious of extending the parish bounty to the unworthy, as they are ready in relieving the industrious, because in every parish many are rated to the poor, out of whole hard labour the money is extorted, that, were it not properly disposed of, might be dissipated in drunkenness, or in rewards to the lazy and indolent, who are in every parish the most clamorous and most troublesome.

Besides, there cannot, perhaps, be a severer aggravation of the distress of an honest, industrious supplicant, than that, after all his pains and labour in endeavoring to support a numerous family, when sickness or accident happens to deprive him of the power of providing for them by his own strength, he is then only to share in the parish bounty in common with his most profligate, lazy, drunken, poaching neighbour, the whole tenor of whose life is an open violation of the laws of God and man. To add, therefore, to the real misery of the industrious poor, ideal notions of their being despised or 
neglected

Life of Books, –with Remarks. 449
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neglected by those with whom the laws have entrusted the care of their support, is to counteract the very principle the writer has professedly adopted, and to add to the miseries inseparable from penury, the farther grievance of discontent.

His pleading the cause of the stranger is truly laudable. The alien is entitled to no support by our laws, and is therefore an object, whenever he becomes poor and in want, of real charity, and should never be passed in our streets, when imploring relief, with unpitying negleét. It will require no extraordinary degree of discernment to discover whether he is old, infirm, lame, or that he has been bred above the ordinary level of working men; in all which cases, to withhold a small portion of our plenty to relieve the stranger within our gates, is not only inconsistent with our character as Christians, but as men. Indeed, the writer of these remarks has often wondered, that, among the many thousand opulent foreigners, that possess large proportions of the riches of this kingdom, no one has been liberal enough to set on foot a subscription for building and endowing a house of charity for the reception and relief of poor distressed strangers. Such a charitable institution would do honour to their humanity; and it is not to be doubted but that very many of our nobility, gentry, and wealthy merchants, would contribute largely to forward the design.

Our author's observations on the severity of the Vagrant Act, by which, like many of our late alts, it defeats its own purposes, is very just. By that act, relief 1s denied, punishment inflicted, and the bare asking for charity is made criminal, though the supplicant may be perishing for want. Can anything be more absurd! But absurdity is the general characteristic of our late acts: they are framed and passed in one sessions, to be amended or repealed in the next.

His doubt, whether a Scotchman or Irishman can gain a settlement in England, upon the authority of Burn's Justice, does not seem well founded, particularly with regard to the former, who, when an inhabitant in England, by the Act of Union, is intitled to all the benefits of the laws, as a free denizen; and when an inhabitant in Scotland, is the only to claim the privileges of his own. 

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The Act of George the First, by which the parochial managers are empowered to farm the poor at a certain rate, though it has in some instances been abused, can never merit the hard epithets which this humane author bestows upon it. It can never be charged with authorizing any set of men to abridge the poor of reasonable food, or to impose on them unreasonable labour; but the complaint that old and young, sick and healthy, are promiscuously crouded into. Ill-contrived apartments, in workhouses not of sufficient capacity to contain with convenience half the number, is but too just, and too general, and certainly calls loudly for reformation. The pernicious influences of corrupted air and distempered bodies, as he very justly observes, has been of late very extensively diffused, and it is hoped will awaken a due sense of the miserable situation of those who are of necessity obliged to remain in these mansions of filthiness and putridity; to which the parish poor are usually confined.

This is a subject on which the author has exerted all his powers of masterly elocution, and it is a subject which must excite compassion on a less pathetic retrospect of known facts.

Having sufficiently exposed the defects of our present poor laws, and shewn the evils consequent on parochial parsimony and parochial delinquency, the writer next proceeds to offer some hints by way of reformation: but this he does with so great deference and modesty, that although he has, as he says, to the utmost of his ability, endeavored to guard against a perversion of his plan, yet every proposition has been made with diffidence and fear, left what he proposes as remedies, should, in the hands appointed to administer them, be converted into poisons.

An abstract of his plan is as follows:
I. The reduction of all the laws relating to the poor into ONE, less liable to mistake or misrepresentation.
II. The parochial division to be abolished, and a more extensive division adopted in its room. He seems to approve of the Hundred division, states the objections to it, and answers them.
III. A general and uniform tax, limited, like the land-tax, to a certain standard (four or five shillings in the pound, he thinks, in a note, an adequate rate). This mode of taxation
he

GENT. MAG, September, 1773
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