That Pitt did little or nothing to avert the hostility of bishops and lawyers in the Upper House convicts him either of apathy or of covert opposition. He is largely responsible for the continuance of the old customs, under which a parish faced the expense of procuring a separate Act of Parliament only under stress of severe dearth; and, as a rule, the crisis ended long before the cumbrous machinery of the law enabled the new lands to come under the plough. It is, however, possible that he hoped to inaugurate a system of enclosures of waste lands by a clause which appeared in his abortive proposals of the year 1797 for the relief of the poor. His Bill on that subject comprised not only very generous plans of relief, but also the grant of cows to the deserving poor, the erection of Schools of Industry in every parish or group of parishes, and facilities for reclaiming waste land. His treatment of the question of poor relief is too extensive a subject to admit of adequate description here; but I propose to return to it and to notice somewhat fully the criticisms of Bentham and others.[434] It must suffice to say that the draft of that measure bespeaks a keen interest in the welfare of the poor, and indeed errs on the side of generosity. Abbot, afterwards Lord Colchester, was asked by Pitt to help in drafting the Poor Bill; and he pronounced it "as bad in the mode as the principles were good in substance."[435] After the withdrawal of Pitt's Poor Bill, nothing was done to facilitate enclosures until the accession of Addington to power. His General Enclosure Act of the year 1801 afforded timely relief in the matter of food-supply, a fact which shows that the difficulties in the way of such a measure were far from serious. The passing of that Bill, it is true, was helped on by the terrible dearth of that year, when the average price of wheat was close on 116 shillings the quarter. But Pitt was content to meet the almost equally acute crisis of 1795-6 by temporary shifts, one of which exasperated the neutral States of the North and prepared the way for the renewal of the hostile League of the Baltic. FOOTNOTES: [420] B.M. Add. MSS., 27808. [421] "H. O.," Geo. III (Domestic), 36. [422] "H. O.," (Departmental), Secs. of State. [423] B.M. Add. MSS., 27808; "Hist. of the Two Acts," 330 _et seq._ [424] Pitt MSS., 190; "W. O.," 113. [425] "H. O.," Geo. III (Domestic), 36. [426] "Parl. Hist.," xxxii, 235-42, 687-700, 1156; Tooke, "Hist. of Prices," i, 185 _et seq._; Porter, "Progress of the Nation," 147, 452. [427] "Dropmore P.," iii, 87, 243, 526-30; "Report of the American Hist. Assoc." (1903), ii, 67-9, 354, 375, 440 _et seq._, 552-8; E. Channing, "United States," 148-50; Cunningham, 512, 694. [428] "Mems. of Sir John Sinclair," i, ch. iv; ii, ch. i.