he could do by dismissing all his present workmen. There would then be one hundred surplus labourers in the district. As these must be maintained at the expense of the two properties, each proprietor would eventually be compelled, in self-defence, to employ fifty. The landholder who originally employed this number will thus escape taxation, without engaging more labourers than he requires; but his labourers will cease to be independent workmen, chosen and paid by himself, and subject to his own control. They will be sent to him by the Relief Committee of the district; they will be placed under the superintendence of an expensive staff of stipendiaries appointed by the Board of Works, and will be paid out of the funds raised for the relief of the poor. A system not very dissimilar to this was acted upon in several parts of England, previous to the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and was found to produce effects most demoralizing to the labouring population--paralyzing all the energies of independent labour and of individual enterprise, and in many respects operating most unjustly upon particular classes of property."[198] Referring to the value of independent labour, the Premier said: "I admit the evils of the present system, but I think that still greater danger would have ensued if we had done that which I conceive to be one of the most pernicious acts which a Government can do, the depriving labourers of their independence, and thus permanently injuring the great and important class to which those labourers belonged."