In reply to the following Questions respecting Labourers, you are requested to distinguish Agriculturists from Artisans, and the Skilled from the Unskilled. 1. What is the general amount of wages of an able-bodied male labourer, by the day, the week, the month or the year, with and without provisions, in summer and in winter? 2. Is piece-work general? 3. What, in the whole, might an average labourer, obtaining an average amount of employment, both in day-work and in piece-work, expect to earn in a year, including harvest-work, and the value of all his advantages and means of living? 4. State, as nearly as you can, the average annual expenditure of labourers of different descriptions, specifying schooling for children, religious teachers, &c. 5. Is there any, and what employment for women and children? 6. What can women, and children under 16, earn per week, in summer, in winter and harvest, and how employed? 7. What, in the whole, might a labourer’s wife and four children, aged 14, 11, 8 and 5 years respectively (the eldest a boy), expect to earn in a year, obtaining, as in the former case, an average amount of employment? 8. Could such a family subsist on the aggregate earnings of the father, mother and children, and if so, on what food? 9. Could it lay by anything, and how much? 10. The average quantity of land annexed to a labourer’s habitation? 11. What class of persons are the usual owners of labourers’ habitations? 12. The rent of labourers’ habitations, and price on sale? 13. Whether any lands let to labourers; if so, the quantity to each, and at what rent? 14. The proportion of annual deaths to the whole population? 15. The proportion of annual births to the whole population? 16. The proportion of annual marriages to the whole population? 17. The average number of children to a marriage? 18. Proportion of legitimate to illegitimate births? 19. The proportion of children that die before the end of their first year? 20. Proportion of children that die before the end of their tenth year? 21. Proportion of children that die before the end of their eighteenth year. 22. Average age of marriage, distinguishing males from females? 23. Causes by which marriages are delayed? 24. Extent to which, 1st, the unmarried; 2nd, the married, save? 25. Mode in which they invest their savings? [1] Extracts from the information on the Administration of the Poor Laws. These questions, together with the volume to which they refer, of Extracts of Information on the Administration of the Poor Laws, were transmitted by Viscount Palmerston to His Majesty’s Foreign Ministers and Consuls on the 30th November, 1833. The replies to them form the remaining contents of the following pages.