The result of these operations, during the three years and nine months
when Dr. Chalmers personally presided over them, was instructive and
striking. The whole number of new cases admitted on the roll was
twenty, and the annual cost of these was £66. The number of cases
originally committed to Dr. Chalmers was ninety-eight, of whom
twenty-eight had died, and thirteen had been displaced in consequence of
a scrutiny, leaving (with the twenty new cases) seventy-seven on the
roll, the cost of whose yearly maintenance was £190. In the second year
of their operations the church was able to take the whole of the
poorhouse inmates connected with the parish off that institution, at an
expense to themselves of £90 a year. In this way the pauperism that had
cost the town £1400 was now managed at an expenditure of £280. And the
pauperism itself became a decreasing quantity. ’The St. John’s deacons,
mingling as they did familiarly with all the families, and proving
themselves by word and deed the true but enlightened friends of all, did
far more to prevent pauperism than to provide for it.’
It cannot be said that his theory of pauperism was a hasty scheme, the
result of mere benevolent impulse, or that Chalmers did not take
sufficient means to acquaint himself with the subject in all its
aspects. He had already given expression to his ideas in the _Edinburgh
Review_, and shown that the matter had engaged his most earnest study.
Later, he made an elaborate journey through England in order to become
personally acquainted with the places and the persons there most
conversant with the subject. This visit embraced Liverpool, Manchester,
Birmingham, Gloucester, Wells, Salisbury, Southampton, Portsmouth,
London, Bury St. Edmunds, Bedford, and Nottingham. The journey occupied
seven weeks, and in the course of it he came into contact with many of
the public men who were interested in that class of subjects,
conspicuous among whom were Lord Calthorpe and Mr. Fowell Buxton. The
anti-slavery leaders, such as Mr. Z. Macaulay, Mr. Babington, and Mr.
Clarkson, were generally sympathetic, but their energies were too much
absorbed in the anti-slavery movement to admit of their throwing them
into Dr. Chalmers’s scheme. Indeed there were but few men of mark at
that time interested in social questions. In his sense of the urgency
of these questions, Dr. Chalmers was before his age. The more immediate
object he had in view, that of gathering information, was sufficiently
accomplished; but there is no indication that he made much progress in
indoctrinating public men with his views. If ever he cherished the hope
that a party would arise in England who should deal with pauperism on
his lines, that hope was never fulfilled. Nor was it the privilege of
Dr. Chalmers to find his experiment carried out thoroughly in other
places, or even to witness its permanence in his own chosen locality.
For several years it continued to prosper; in 1830, ten years after the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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