“A repeal of our present wasteful and degrading system of poor-laws, and a substitution of a just and efficient poor-law (based upon the original Act of Elizabeth), which would centralize the rates, and dispense them equitably and economically for the beneficial employment and relief of the destitute poor. The rates to be levied only upon the owners of every description of realized property. The employment to be of a healthy, useful, and reproductive kind, so as to render the poor self-sustaining and self-respecting. Till such employment be procured, the relief of the poor to be, in all cases, promptly and liberally administered as a right, and not grudgingly doled out as a boon; the relief not to be accompanied with obduracy, insult, imprisonment in the workhouses, separation of married couples, the breaking up of families, or any such other harsh and degrading conditions as, under the present system, convert relief into punishment, and treat the unhappy applicant rather as a convicted criminal than as (what he really is) the victim of an unjust and vitiated state of society.” What is there unjust or impracticable in this proposition? Who ought, by right, to support the poor? Clearly, those who have most profited by their labour, and whose enormous revenues (derived from the aggregate labour of the people every year, without yielding any equivalent) are the main cause of so many labourers falling into pauperism. And who are these? Clearly, the owners of _realised_ property,--the owners of lands, houses, mines, collieries, turbaries, fisheries, docks, wharfs, canals, bank-stock, railway-shares, consols, and every other description of property yielding an annual income independently of any labour or service or risk on the part of the proprietor. It is not upon mechanics, tradesmen, or professional men who have but their own exertions to trust to for a living, and who may or may not be worth a groat, that the burden should fall. These parties are supposed to render to society an equivalent for what they get, and consequently ought not to be made responsible for keeping others whose poverty they have not caused. At all events, it will be time enough to tax them when they have realised something by their respective callings. But as the others render to society no equivalent for their incomes, as their incomes are purely and wholly the _creation of law_, and not of their own labour or services, and as they are therefore the parties who _make_ the poor, both common sense and common justice demand that they should be made to _keep_ the poor, or at least enable the poor to keep themselves by remunerative labour. Moreover, it was upon these classes, and these only, that the original Act of Queen Elizabeth contemplated the levies should fall. The 43rd Elizabeth extended the rate to every other description of _realised_ property, as well as mere _real_ property; but owing to the comparatively small amount of