I. Effects on Owners of Property.

THE Committee appointed by the House of Commons in 1817, to consider the Poor Laws, stated their opinion, "that unless some efficacious check were interposed, there was then every reason to think that the amount of the assessment would continue to increase, until at a period more or less remote, according to the progress the evil had already made in different places, it should have absorbed the profits of the property on which the rate might have been assessed, producing thereby the neglect and ruin of the land and the waste, or removal of other property, to the utter subversion of the happy order of society so long upheld in these kingdoms." In consequence of the recommendations of that Committee, a check was interposed by the 59 Geo. III. c. 12. But though that Act, by restricting the power of the magistrates to order relief, and by authorising the removal of the Irish and Scotch paupers, the appointment of representative vestries and of assistant overseers, the rating the owners of small tenements, and the giving relief by way of loan, occasioned, during the six years that immediately followed it, a progressive diminution of the amount of the Poor Law assessment, its beneficial enactments appear to be no longer capable of struggling with the evil tendencies of the existing system. The year ending the 25th of March, 1824, was the last year of regular improvement. And we have seen that the amount of relief now given, when estimated in commodities, is actually greater, and greater in proportion to our population, than it was when that Report was made. It has increased still more when considered with reference to the value of the property on which it is assessed.

We are happy to say that not many cases of the actual dereliction of estates have been stated to us. Some, however, have occurred; and we have given in the extracts from our Evidence the details of one, the parish of Cholesbury, in the county of Bucks. It appears that in this parish, the population of which has been almost stationary since 1801, in which, within the memory of persons now living, the rates were only 10l. 11s. a year, and only one person received relief, the sum raised for the relief of the poor rose from 99l. 4s. a year, in 1816, to 150l. 5s. in 1831; and in 1832, when it was proceeding at the rate of 367l. a year, suddenly ceased in consequence of the impossibility to continue its collection; the landlords having given up their rents, the farmers their tenancies, and the clergyman his glebe and his tithes. The clergyman, Mr. Jeston, states that in October, 1832, the parish officers threw up their books, and the poor assembled in a body before his door, while he was in bed, asking for advice and food. Partly from his own small means, partly from the charity of neighbours, and partly by rates in aid, imposed on the neighbouring parishes, they were for some time supported; and the benevolent Rector recommends that the whole of the land should be divided among the able-bodied paupers, and adds, "that he has reason to think that at the expiration of two years, the parish in the interval receiving the assistance of rates in aid, the whole of the poor would be able and willing to support themselves, the aged and impotent of course excepted." In Cholesbury, therefore, the expense of maintaining the poor has not merely swallowed up the whole value of the land; it requires even the assistance for two years of rates in aid, from other parishes, to enable the able-bodied, after the land has been given up to them, to support themselves; and the aged and impotent must even then remain a burthen on the neighbouring parishes.

Our Evidence exhibits no other instance of the abandonment of a parish, but it contains many in which the pressure of the poor-rate has reduced the rent to half, or to less than half, of what it would have been if the land had been situated in an unpauperized district, and some in which it has been impossible for the owner to find a tenant.

Mr. Majendie states, that in Lenham, Kent, at the time of his visit, some of the land was out of cultivation. A large estate has been several years in the hands of the proprietor, and a farm of 420 acres of good land, tithe free and well situated, had just been thrown up by the tenant, the poor-rate on it amounting to 300l. a year. He mentions another place, in which a farm well situated, of average quality, was in vain offered at 5s. an acre, not from objection to the quality of the land, but because men of capital will not connect themselves with a parish in which the poor-rates would keep them in a constant state of vexation and anxiety. He states, that in Ardingly, those farmers who have any capital left, withdraw from the parish as soon as their leases expire. One of them admitted to him that it was out of the power of the landlords to relieve them.

Mr. Power, after mentioning the universal complaint in Cambridgeshire, that substantial tenants cannot be found at the lowest assignable rents, goes on to say, that Mr. Quintin, a gentlemen of considerable landed property in the county, told him that he had a farm at Gransden, for which he could not get a tenant, even at 5s. an acre, though land from which thirty bushels of wheat an acre had been obtained. "Downing College," he adds, "has a property of 5,000 acres in this county, lying principally in the parishes of Tadlow, East Hatley, Croydon, and Gamlingay; it is found impossible, notwithstanding the lowering the rents to an extreme point, to obtain men of substance for tenants. Several farms of considerable extent have changed hands twice within the last five years, from insolvency of the tenants in some cases, in others from the terror of that prospect. The amount of arrears at this time is such as only a collegiate body could support. I draw from authentic sources, being myself a fellow of the college." In the same county, Mr. Power found that at Soham, a total absorption of the value of the land in twelve or fourteen years was anticipated; and Mr. Cowell, that at Great Shelford the same result was expected to take place in ten.

Mr. Pilkington's description of several places in Leicestershire is equally alarming. In Hinkley he found the poor-rate exceeding 1l. an acre, and rapidly increasing, and a general opinion that the day is not distant when rent must cease altogether. On visiting Wigston Magna in November, 1832, he was informed that the value of property had fallen one half since 1820, and was not saleable even at that reduction. It does not appear, indeed, that it ought to have sold for more than two or three years' purchase, the net rental not amounting to 4,000l. a year, and the poor-rate expenditure growing at the rate of 1,000l. increase in a single year. And on his return to that neighbourhood, three months after, the statement made to him was that property in land was gone; that even the rates could not be collected without regular summons and judicial sales, and that the present system must ensure, and very shortly, the total ruin of every individual of any property in the parish. We cannot wonder, after this, at the statement of an eminent solicitor at Loughborough, that it is now scarcely possible to effect a sale of property in that neighbourhood at any price.

The following answers, taken from a multitude of others of a similar nature, contained in Appendix (B.), are to the same effect:—

"Annual value of the real property, as assessed April, 1815, 3,390l. Annual value of the real property, as assessed November, 1829, 1,959l. 5s. It has undoubtedly fallen in value since the last valuation, i. e. in the last two years, and the population has been more than trebled in 30 years: 1801, 306; 1811, 707; 1821, 897; 1831, 938: and that in spite of an emigration of considerable amount, at the parish expense, in 1829. The eighteen-penny children will eat up this parish in ten years more, unless some relief be afforded us."

"If some material change does not very soon take place, the time is not far distant when the whole rent will be absorbed in the poors'-rates."

"Much land in the hands of proprietors wanting tenants. Our poors'-rate being high, makes farms in other parishes more desirable than in this."

"In the adjoining parish, the owners of untenanted farms, who are not farmers, fear to occupy, and prefer the loss of rent to the unlimited expense in poor-rate which would overwhelm the profits of one not perfectly experienced in farming, and the parochial concerns it involves."

"In the neighbourhood of Aylesbury, there were 42 farms untenanted at Michaelmas last; most of these are still on the proprietors' hands; and on some, no acts of husbandry have been done since, in order to avoid the payment of poor-rate. I attribute these circumstances principally to the operation of the Poor Laws."

"In the parish of Thornborough, Bucks, there are at this time 600 acres of land unoccupied, and the greater part of the other tenants have given notice of their intention to quit their farms, owing entirely to the increasing burthen of the poors'-rate."

We have made these quotations for the purpose of drawing attention, not so much to the immediate evils which the land-owners of the pauperized districts are undergoing, as to the more extensive and irremediable mischiefs of which these are the fore-runners. It appears to us, that any parish in which the pressure of the poor-rates has compelled the abandonment of a single farm, is in imminent danger of undergoing the ruin which has already befallen Cholesbury. The instant the poor-rate on a given farm exceeds that surplus which, if there were no poor-rate, would be paid in rent, the existing cultivation becomes not only unprofitable, but a source of absolute loss. And as every diminution of cultivation has a double effect in increasing the rate on the remaining cultivation, the number of unemployed labourers being increased at the same instant that the fund for payment of rates is diminished, the abandonment of property, when it has once begun, is likely to proceed in a constantly accelerated ratio. Accordingly, it appears from Mr. Jeston's statement, that scarcely a year elapsed between the first land in Cholesbury going out of cultivation and the abandonment of all except sixteen acres.