Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

142

PENALTIES OF POVERTY IN ENGLAND.

would be difficult to point out in the history of the papacy, any more daring and flagrant disregard of Christian principles than this. The Romish church in all ages, and in all countries, has admitted the claims of the poor, and also the obligations which those claims imposed. The Protestant church of England commenced its career by seizing their estates, and turning the poor over to the tender mercies of the government. The legislation for the poor was characterized, during the reign of Henry VIII., by its fixing upon the unemployed poor the epithet of "vagabonds," and by inflicting the penalties of whipping, cropping, branding, and death for the offence of being vagabonds. Many thousands were hung in the reign of that first head of the English church for being vagabonds; that is, unemployed or idle poor. No doubt the dissolution of the monasteries and other religious houses had sent forth a host of inmates stripped of all means of support, and had deprived of their customary employments vast

troops of labourers, whose services were replaced by others more favoured by the new occupants of the estates, and had driven away in despair hosts of poor who had lived upon the regular alms of the religious establishments. The mischiefs which arose from discharging such a multitude of destitute paupers upon the community must have been grave enough to require all the patience and all the wisdom of the public authorities, and more especially as the subject was new to them. No wonder these persons, so suddenly and utterly stripped of their only comfort and hopes for this life, became unruly, wandered like vagabonds, and rendered stringent measures necessary to keep them in awe. This is no place to write the history of the English poor, of the legislation applied to them, nor of the >administration of the poor-laws; (whatever may be said of the wisdom or the mercy or the statesmanship displayed in the treatment of English poor, the whole constitutes such a disgrace to the established church, and to Pro

144 THE POOR-HOUSE, STIGMA OF PROTESTANTISM.

testantism, as can never be adequately characterized. During three centuries, she has shut her eyes from beholding, and shut her ears from hearing, and withheld her hands from removing the woes of ten generations of increasing millions of suffering poor. She has not fed them nor clothed them, nor visited them in sickness nor in prison; she has left them in charge of the national authorities. And what have these done? In this long period, what have they devised for the poor? They have long since reduced the treatment of paupers to a system which has since been adopted for criminals. They have invented the poor-house, that stigma of Protestantism; they have degraded the poor to the level of the worst criminals; they have made charity dependent on the parish boundaries; they have enacted a scene of protracted and bitter litigation to determine which parish may be acquitted of the duty of relieving the poor; they spend as much in efforts to cast off the burden of a poor family as would relieve scores

of families; they let out the poor by contract to the maintenance of a contractor; they look upon the support of the poor as a grievous burden, and regard it as a matter of business, in which economy must rule, until the lowest cost at which life can be sustained is found; and accordingly the allowance of the poor has gone far below that of the soldier or sailor, or even the thief and murderer in prison. They regard the pauper as a public evil, the cost of which is to be kept at the lowest possible point; and they deny the obligation of such legislation as might have a tendency to amend the condition of their hordes of poor.

Whether the English authorities have in all this fulfilled their duties as legislators and governors, is a question into which we cannot enter. But the conduct of the established church, which has for centuries looked upon this scene of famine and nakedness and poorhouse imprisonment, without an effort as a church to fulfil her Christian obligations to the poor, is such as no language can with proper

[ocr errors]

146 THE RICH MAN IN HELL LIFTED UP HIS EYES.

severity stigmatize. The English poor have been increasing in comparative numbers and destitution from the Reformation to the present hour; and during this period, the confiscated revenues of the poor in the keeping of the church have been increasing. What possible affinity can that church, as such, have with the religion of Christ, which, whilst it absorbs the living of the poor, repudiates all care of them? Could such a church appear before Christ, without hearing the command, "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and come follow me ?" This is the lightest rebuke that is conceivable in the circumstances. But as this command was given to one whose heart was merely too much fixed on riches which were his own, the case of the church of England and the poor who are pining in want, and dying at her door, may be much more fitly illustrated by the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, who, for his hardness of heart, "in hell lifted up his eyes in torments." Even this does not reach the enor

« AnteriorContinuar »