The right treatment of pauperism continued to exercise his mind and to draw forth his testimony on every available occasion. In 1829 he was summoned to London to give evidence before a Parliamentary Committee on the Irish Poor-Law. His view was ever the same. A compulsory rate created a spirit of dependence, and thereby tended to the increase of pauperism and the degradation rather than the elevation of the people. It was often said that comfort tended to the improvement of character. His belief was the very opposite; it was character that tended to the increase of comfort. His success in Glasgow led him to believe that the same system would succeed in Ireland. He had sought to stimulate friendship and kindliness among all classes, so as to induce them to help one another in times of need; nothing had had a greater effect in diminishing pauperism. This was far too valuable and efficient a weapon to be carelessly thrown away. But to all his schemes for remedying pauperism there came a death-blow in 1844. In 1840, Dr. Pultney Alison of Edinburgh, a medical practitioner of great eminence and not less benevolence, published a pamphlet in which he drew a painful picture of the miserable condition of the poor, especially in many parts of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and strongly urged the necessity of an ampler provision for them, secured by law, though one result of this would be the increase of the cost of Scottish pauperism from £150,000 to £800,000 per annum. Chalmers did what he could to counterwork Dr. Alison. When the British Association met in Glasgow in 1840, he contributed a paper on the subject, and the public interest was so great that the meeting where it was discussed had to be adjourned to a church. He delivered several lectures to his students, which were afterwards collected and published in a volume. But the absorbing interest which had arisen in the Church question that was now under vehement discussion, and other causes, chilled the interest of the public in pauperism; and in 1844 a measure was enacted by Parliament, in opposition to the views of Chalmers. To him it seemed that even though an immediate improvement in the condition of the poor might be thus obtained, it must be at the sacrifice of many of the virtues that went to elevate them. In the political world two great questions were agitating the community about the time when Chalmers came to Edinburgh—Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill.