PARISH POOR IN LONDON.

Colonist, Volume II, Issue 131, 21 January 1859, Page 4

PARISH POOR IN LONDON.

It is a fine thing, of course, to keep ever}*1 beadle tight in hand; for if one beadle should ever get over his parish bounds, and so come to confront, upon his own territory, another beadle, Hector and Achilles! there would be a piece of work. Between them it should go hard but they would trample into pulp the British constitution. Before everything, let us preserve all the rights, and all the wrongs too, of the ancient

parish. Let there bs.no concert between neighbours to secure a fair division of the work that parishes must do; but let every clan of ratepayers rally round its own bright beadle and defy all beadledom beside.

Some revolutionary persons have been making a preposterous suggestion. They say —look at the London poor. We will not trouble you to go so far back as to the days of Alfred, since which time, you tell us, parishes have been what they are; but go back to only a quarter of a century, and you will find the London population to have been so distributed that there was a tolerably even division among ratepayers of the cost of maintenance for the destitute poor. And see, these centralising revolutionists go on to observe, see how, in one day, the London poor all crowd together into parishes of needy people, being driven out of the wealthy quarters of the town. From their much, therefore, how little is contributed by the rich ; out of their little how mucfr do the poor give, under that strict system which compels the needy to maintain the destitute. Wealthy ratepayers in the squares and terraces of Paddington are only asked to pay, out of their superfluity, fourpence in the pound for the few paupers burdening so rich a parish. Impoverished ratepayers in the lanes and small streets of Saint George's-in-the-Easl, are forced to pay out of their doubtful little incomes, three shillings and ninepence in the pound for the relief of the great mass of hopeless poverty whereof they form the upper part. This has to be ground out of them. It is, to so many, thegiftofbreadoutofhungr}'- mouths to mouths yet hungrier. In this one parish there are four thousand summonses for rates issued in every quarter. What can be more absurd and preposterous than an attempt to modify a system working in this manner, so clearly a part of the ancient parochial system, so distinctly the birthright of a Briton, and a bulwark of the constitution ? What more need be said to crush any such attempt than, that to ask the rich parishes to help the poor ones within the bounds of the metropolis, is to introduce the small end of the wedge ?It is centralisation. It cuts at the root of liberty.

Of course it does! The three hundred thousand paupers relieved every year in London parishes ought to be paid for chiefly out of the small tradesman's till: and, if the inhabitants of wealthy parishes pay wages punctually to their footmen while they work, that is as much as can be reasonably looked for from them. When the men of plush sicken in service, and can no longer give a return for what they eat, it is quite time that they should be off and throw themselves upon the rates of the poor parishes, whence they were originally drawn. That was all properly settled by a merciful and wise alteration of the Law of Settlement in eighteen hundred and thirty-four; whereby hired servants ceased to become chargeable upon' the parishes in which their employers live. Thirty-two per cent, of the inhabitants of Saint George's Hanover Square are thus devoted*to the uses of rich; and till the judicious law was made that cast them out of the parish into other parishes whenever they fell into distress, the ratepayers of Saint George's Hanover-square paicl two and, sixpence in the pound for the relief. of destitution. Now they.have thrown their burden, so to speak, over the parish wall into the premises of poorer neighbours, and pay sixpence or sevenpence against the ten shillings payable in Saint Nicholas, Deptford; the eight shillings in St. Ann's, Blackwall; and ninepence in St. George's-in-the-East. •

The. most preposterous part of a preposterous case is founded on the fact that, whereas pauperism costs the metropolis about three-quarters of a million yearly, and the property tax value over the same area is about fourteen millions, an uniform contribution from the London people for London poor would hardly amount to more than a shilling in the pound, and would be sufficient. Why, where's the principle of this? Principle says clearly, and proves by tables, that the poor ratepayers of Whitechapel, Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, and such places, shall pay actually three

limes as much as the ratepayers of Saint James's or Saint George's Hanover-square, for feeding and housing of the destitute, and that, moreover, when they have .done that, they shall feed ; three'or'four mouths, where :the richer ..parishes feed, one, with every shilling that is raised. Three millions of property in four rich unions maintaining .six or seven thousand poor in-door and out-door. The same amount of property in twelve poor unions is charged with its six or seven thousand poor, and, with yet seven and thirty thousand more besides.

These are. not even their own poor in many thousand cases; not the poor men who work, when they, do work, for the ratepayers by whom, when' destitute, they.are supported. When St. Katherine's Docks were formed, more than a thousand poor men's houses were pulled down; the docks took possession of a parish, and dispersed their paupers and their laborers into the surrounding parishes of Whitechapel, Aidgate, St. George's in the East, and Shadwell. After five years, the people acquired their settlement, and now the St. Katherine Company pays only seven hundred a-year in poor-rates, while the London Dock Company, next door, employing the same class of men, paid last year more than nineteen thousand pounds. The docks of one company happen to occupy a parish ; the docks of the other company happen to occupy portions of four parishes-^viz., St. George's East, Shadwell, Wapping, and Aldgate.

Not long ago, there was the case in the papers of a man summoned for non-pay-ment of his poor-rates who was himself actually then in receipt of parish help; and the fact which we stated (and which we have taken with others from a pamphlet by the incumbent of Saint George's-in-the-East) that four thousand men are sum-' moned for übn-payment of their poor-rates every quarter, in the writer's own parish, shows how many there must be who are almost paupers, to whom we look mainly for the funds that shall support our London workhouses.

Alter this state of things, says the old world politician, and you open the door to irresponsible scattering away of money, to an unconstitutional and alarming loss of control, by the ratepayer, over the expenditure of rates extracted from him.

In all seriousness, ]ci us hope that this is not an unanswerable objection; that if it hold good against the proposal made in a certain bill which was brought before the notice of the House of Commons by Mr. Ayrton, on the twelfth of last May, in a speech that, would have ensured the rejection of a better measure—it is yet within the compass of man's wit to prove that whatever is inseparable from the constitution of this country is allied not less closely to ■> kindlinees and justice.— Household

Words.