“These evils,” says Malthus, “attendant on the poor laws seem to be irremediable. If assistance is to be distributed to a certain class of people, a power must be lodged somewhere of discriminating the proper objects, and of managing the concerns of the institutions that are necessary; but any great interference with the affairs of other people is a species of tyranny, and in the common course of things, the exercise of this power may be expected to become grating to those who are driven to ask for support. The tyranny of justices, churchwardens, and overseers, is a common complaint among the poor; but the fault does not lie so much in these persons, who probably before they were in power were not more cruel than other people, but in the nature of all such institutions. I feel persuaded that if the poor laws had never existed in this country, though there might have been a few more instances of very severe distress, the aggregate mass of happiness among the common people would have been much greater than it is at present.” The famous 43rd of Elizabeth, which has been so often referred to and admired, enacts that the overseers of the poor “shall take order from time to time, by and with the consent of two or more justices, for setting to work the children of all such whose parents shall not by the said persons be thought able to keep and maintain their children; and also such persons married or unmarried, as having no means to maintain them, use no ordinary and daily trade of life to get their living by. And also to raise, weekly or otherwise, by taxation of every inhabitant, and every occupier of lands in the said parish (in such competent sums as they shall think fit) a convenient stock of flax, hemp, wax, thread, iron, and other necessary ware and stuff, to set the poor to work.” “What is this,” exclaims Malthus, “but saying that the funds for the maintenance of labour in this country may be increased at will, and without limit, by a _fiat_ of Government, or an assessment of the overseers. Strictly speaking, this clause is as arrogant and as absurd as if it had enacted that two ears of wheat should grow where one only had grown before. Canute, when he commanded the waves not to wet his princely foot, did not, in reality, assume a greater power over the laws of nature. No directions are given to the overseers how to increase the funds for the maintenance of labour; the necessity of industry, economy, and enlightened exertion, in the management of agricultural and commercial capital, is not insisted on for this purpose; but it is expected that a miraculous increase of these funds should immediately follow an edict of the Government, used at the discretion of some ignorant parish officers.”