“It will be said, perhaps, that the same reasoning might be applied to any new capital brought into competition in a particular trade or manufacture, which can rarely be done without injuring, in some degree, those that were engaged in it before. But there is a material difference in the two cases. In this, the competition is perfectly fair, and what every man on entering his business must lay his account to. He may rest secure that he will not be supplanted, unless his competitor possess superior skill and industry. In the other case, the competition is supported by a great bounty, by which means, notwithstanding very inferior skill and industry on the part of his competitors, the independent workman may be undersold, and unjustly excluded from the market. He himself is made to contribute to this competition against his own earnings, and the funds for the maintenance of labour are thus turned from the support of a trade which yields a proper profit to one which cannot maintain itself without a bounty. It should be observed in general that when a fund for the maintenance of labour is raised by assessment, the greatest part of it is not a new capital brought into trade, but an old one, which before was much more profitably employed, turned into a new channel. The farmer pays to the poor’s rates for the encouragement of a bad and unprofitable manufacture what he would have employed on his land with infinitely more advantage to his country. In the one case, the funds for the maintenance of labour are daily diminished; in the other, daily increased. And this obvious tendency of assessments for the employment of the poor to decrease the real funds for the maintenance of labour in any country, aggravates the absurdity of supposing that it is in the power of a government to find employment for all its subjects, however fast they may increase.” It is strange how the present generation begins to forget the truths that were clearly seen by the one immediately preceding. We have had a proof of this in the late agitation for Protection _versus_ Free Trade. And on November 5th, 1881, there was another example so given in the case of a deputation of ratepayers of Newington, who waited on Mr. Dodson, the President of the Local Government Board, to ask him to administer out-door relief instead of building a new workhouse at Champion Hill, at a cost of £200,000. The deputation, which actually contained a professor of political economy, Mr. Thorold Rogers, urged that the system of the workhouse test entailed a cost of 7s. a week to the parish, whereas, if persons were relieved at home, 3s. or 4s. would be all that would be required. Well might a French economist write an essay upon “things that are seen, and things that are not seen”!