It appears from this statement, that the 43d of Elizabeth deserves neither the praise nor the blame which have been lavished on it. So far from having been prompted by benevolence, it was a necessary link in one of the heaviest chains in which a people calling itself free has been bound. It was part of a scheme prosecuted for centuries, in defiance of reason, justice, and humanity, to reduce the laboring classes to serfs, to imprison them in their parishes, and to dictate to them their employments and their wages. Of course, persons confined to certain districts by penalties of whipping, mutilation, and death, must be supported; and, if they were capable of labor, it was obvious that they ought to be made to contribute to the expense of their maintenance. Thence arose the provisions for relieving the impotent, and setting to work the able-bodied. But those provisions do not, on the other hand, deserve the censure passed on them by the Committee of the House of Commons in 1817. They were not of a nature to induce the industrious to relax their efforts. They held out no temptations to idleness. The able-bodied, who were the objects of the 43d Elizabeth, were those "who, having no means to maintain themselves, used no ordinary and daily trade of life to get their living by;" such persons were, by the previous acts, criminals; the work to which they were to be put was forced work; and if they did not employ themselves in it, "being thereunto appointed as aforesaid," the justices were to commit them to jail. The industrious laborer was not within the spirit or the words of the act. This was, indeed, the complaint of Lord Hale: "The plaster," says his Lordship, "is not so large as the sore. There are many poor who are able to work if they had it, and had it at reasonable wages, whereby they might support themselves and their families. These are not within the provisions of the law."[8] And it was long before the legislature assented to any extension of the 43d Elizabeth. The 8th and 9th Will. III. cap. 30, passed nearly a century afterwards, "To the intent that the money raised _only_ for the relief of _such as are impotent as well as poor_, may not be misapplied," requires all persons receiving relief, and their families, to wear a badge, containing a large Roman P, and the first letter of the name of the parish from which they received relief; the object being not, as has been supposed, to degrade the pauper, but to afford an easy means of detecting the overseer who had relieved an able-bodied person.