We may be permitted to suggest one alteration of the present law, of considerable importance. In Massachusetts and New York, and perhaps in some other States, paupers who have no settlement in the State are relieved at the expense of the State. In this commonwealth the burthen falls upon the particular district in which the pauper may happen to be. This often occasions considerable expense to certain counties or places from which others are exempt. The construction of a bridge or canal, for instance, will draw to a particular neighbourhood a large number of labourers, many of whom may have no settlement in the State. If disabled by sickness or accident, they must be relieved by the township in which they became disabled, although their labour was employed for the benefit of the State or county, as the case may be, and not for the benefit of the township alone. If provision were made for the payment of the expenses incurred by the township in such case out of the county, or perhaps the State treasury, we think that it would be more just, and that the unhappy labourer would be more likely to obtain adequate relief, than if left to the scanty resources of a single township. A case which is stated in the second volume of the Pennsylvania Reports (_Overseers v. M’Coy_, p. 432), in which it appeared, that a person employed as a labourer on the State Canal, and who was severely wounded in the course of his employment, was passed from one township to another, in consequence of the disinclination to incur the expense of supporting him, until he died of the injury received, shows in a strong light the inconvenience and perils of the present system respecting casual paupers, and may serve to excuse our calling the attention of the legislature to the subject. On the other hand, the Commissioners appointed to revise the poor laws of Massachusetts, after stating that the national provision in their State for the unsettled poor has existed ever since the year 1675, recommend its abolition, by arguments, a portion of which we shall extract, as affording an instructive picture of the worst forms of North American pauperism: (pp. 59, 60, 61.)