§ 2. THE ALLOWANCE SYSTEM OF RELIEF--This state of things was aggravated by various misfortunes. The latter part of the eighteenth century was marked by almost chronic scarcity, and after 1790 wheat was rarely below 50_s._ a quarter, and often double that price. The famine was enhanced by the restrictions of the Corn Laws; meanwhile, population was growing with portentous and almost inexplicable rapidity. The factories employed large numbers of hands, but these were chiefly children whose parents were often compelled to live upon the labour of their little ones; and the introduction of machinery had naturally caused a tremendous dislocation in industry, which could not be expected to right itself immediately. Poverty was so widespread that, in 1795, the Berkshire justices, in a now famous meeting at Speenhamland, near Newbury, declared the old quarter sessions assessment of wages insufficient, besought employers to give rates more in proportion to the cost of living, but added that if employers refused to do this they would make an allowance to every poor family in accordance with its numbers. This allowance system succeeded in demoralizing both employers and employed alike, taking the responsibility of giving decent wages off the shoulders of the farmers, and putting a premium upon the incontinence and thriftlessness of the labourers. This method of relief was general from about 1795 to 1834, in fact until the enactment of the New Poor Law. Employers of labour, manufacturing as well as agricultural, put down wages in many parts of the country to what was simply a starvation point, knowing that an allowance would be made to the labourers, upon the {189} magistrates’ orders, out of the poor rates. The wages actually paid to able-bodied men were frequently only five or six shillings a week, but relief to the amount of four, five, six, or seven shillings a week, according to the size of the man’s family, was given out of the rates. Such a system could not fail to have a permanently disastrous influence upon the moral and social condition of those who suffered from it, taking from them all self-reliance, all hope, all incentives to improving their position in life. And as a matter of fact its ill-effects, especially in agricultural districts, are even yet apparent.