for setting up a public manufactory of coarse cloth, of which the charges for materials and labour in producing thirty-two yards would be 11_l._ 15_s._ He calculated that the cloth, if sold, would only yield 12_l._ The excellent Judge does not make any calculation of the cost of implements, or rent, or superintendence. He desires to employ fifty-six poor people, who are paid by the parish 400_l._ per annum, and by this cloth manufacture he will give them the 400_l._ for their work, and save the parish their cost. One thing is forgotten. The pauper labour yielding no profit, and consequently preventing any accumulation, the labourers must be kept down to the minimum of subsistence, which appears to be about seven pounds per annum for each labourer. The earnings of the artisan and handicraft are estimated by Gregory King at thirty-eight pounds per annum. These were the wages of skilled labourers. The pauper labourers were unskilled. If these schemes had not broken down by their own weight, and workhouse manufactories had gone on producing a competition of unskilled labourers with skilled, the rate of wages would have been more and more deteriorated, and the amount of poor seeking workhouse employment as a last resource more and more increased. Experience has very satisfactorily demonstrated that these schemes for employing the poor ought to be strictly limited to the production of articles of necessity for their own consumption. Even the production of such articles is scarcely remunerating,--that is, the produce scarcely returns the cost of materials and superintendence. Even the boasted Free and Pauper Colonies of Holland have turned out to be commercial failures. They are not self-sustaining. The want of skill in the colonists, and their disinclination to labour, having no immediate individual benefit from their labours, have combined to produce the result that one good day-labourer is worth five colonists working in common. There are also tenants of small colonial farms, at a low rent, and having many advantages. They are not so prosperous as the little farmers out of the colony, who pay a higher rent, and have no incidental benefits. The solution of the question is thus given:--"The certainty that the society will maintain them, whether they save or not, has an unfavourable influence on their habits."[42]