There seems, underlying John Clark’s words, a notion that if any injury is done to the poor by enclosure, proper and sufficient compensation will be made in the ordinary course to the persons injured out of the poor-rates. The logical deduction is that the profits of enclosure should contribute to the poor-rates, and I have noted thirteen enclosures of wastes and commons in which this was done. Another logical deduction was that the poor rate in parishes in which waste was enclosed was, in part at least, a species of common property belonging to the poor; and to deprive them of this property was robbery, unless the commons were restored. This view was vigorously expressed by Cobbett in his “Political Register,” at the time of the introduction of the Poor Law of 1834, and from him became part of the traditional stock of political ideas handed down through the Chartists to the Labour movement of recent times. Arthur Young, in a pamphlet published in 1801,[72] not only insists upon the injury to the poor from Enclosure Acts as ordinarily drawn and put into execution, but pleads for enclosure on methods which would tend to the social elevation of the labourer. His proposals, which strike one as, for the time, wise and statesmanlike, though they ignore some considerations which would be of great importance to-day, were: (1) That in the case of small commons in the midst of an enclosed country, labourers should be allowed to absorb the whole by gradual encroachments, thus building up small properties for themselves. (2) In the case of extensive wastes, procedure must be by Act of Parliament, but all Acts should secure enough land for every cottager to keep a cow both summer and winter, such land to be _inalienable from the cottage, and the ownership to be vested in the parish_. [72] “Enquiry into the propriety of applying wastes to the better support and nourishment of the poor.” I have found one Act which realises Arthur Young’s ideal of an Enclosure Act. It was passed in 1824 for Pottern in Wiltshire, and though it was an Act for the enclosure of a common only, no commonable meadow or common field being included, I give its provisions here on account of its intrinsic interest. The ownership of the whole common was vested in the Bishop of Salisbury, who was lord of the manor, the vicar and churchwardens, in trust for the parish. The trustees were required to lease it in small holdings, with or without rent, to poor, honest, and industrious persons, who had not, except in cases of accident or illness, availed themselves of Poor Law relief. The following Acts, all (except that for Earsham) for “extinguishing village communities,” _i.e._, for enclosing all the commonable lands of the parishes or townships, which in each case include commonable arable fields, have special provisions to safeguard the interests of the poor:--