And, it is very curious matter for reflection, to note how ready the comfortable classes were to acquiesce in tolerating this state of things. Schemes of amelioration were broached by a few, but they were generally based upon a total ignorance of first-cause. Your social tinker,--amiable, bland, and very serious,--caught a glimpse of the poor wretches so far beneath him; and, straightway recollecting the words of Scripture, that the poor should “never cease out of the land,” opened his purse-strings, exhorted his friends to do the like,--and left matters worse than before.[9] Your local authority, and your parson-pluralist, deeply impressed with the need of preserving the “indispensable gradations of society,” in their full integrity, refused a cow to the cottager, lest he should be thereby rendered too independent! absolutely ignorant of the fact, that forty or fifty years previously, the rural labourer not only had his cow,--but his pigs, his geese, his beer, and his bacon, and a tolerable share of the comforts of life: his outward condition, in point of fact, being scarcely inferior to that of the farmers, and even the clergy, around him. Now, in this year of grace 1807, there was no man living who was a better authority on this topic, than the hero of these pages. And, what is more, there was no living being, who had a tenderer sympathy with the wants and the wailings of the meanest fellow-creature; be it a skylark, or be it a ploughboy. And the tinkers, and the tailors, solemnly going to work with new patches, the only end of which must be the further enslavement and degradation of the poor; and the end of which could not possibly be the healing of their stomachs, or the mending of their breeches and their gowns; he now bursts out,-- “I, for my part, should not be at all surprised, if some one were to propose the selling of the poor, or the mortgaging of them to the fund-holders. Ay! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin and Leveller as long as you please. I WISH TO SEE THE POOR MEN OF ENGLAND WHAT THE POOR MEN OF ENGLAND WERE WHEN I WAS BORN; AND FROM ENDEAVOURING TO ACCOMPLISH THIS WISH NOTHING BUT THE WANT OF MEANS SHALL MAKE ME DESIST.” Mr. Whitbread’s Poor Law Bills[10] of 1807 were the present occasion of the subject being before the public. The income-tax was ten per cent., and the quartern loaf averaged eleven-pence, at this period; whilst the wages of the rural labourer were so low, that the parish universally supplemented them in the form of relief. This practice, indeed, had become such an abuse, that the farmer would refuse to employ men at fair wages--throw them upon the workhouse,--and then take their labour upon the reduced scale paid out of the rates; thus entailing upon his neighbours a share of the expenses of his own establishment. In many parishes _every_ labourer was a pauper.