 | CHAPTER III SOCIAL PROBLEMS The English Utilitarians (Vol.1) |  |
Notes
See Sir G. Nicholl's History of the Poor-law, 1854. A new edition with life by H.G. Willink, appeared in 1898.
M'Culloch's note to Wealth of Nations, p. 65. M'Culloch in his appendix makes some sensible remarks upon the absence of any properly constituted parochial 'tribunal'.
Thomas Firmin (1632-1677), a philanthropist, whose Socianianism did not exclude him from the friendship of such liberal bishops as Tillotson and Fowler, started a workhouse in 1676.
William Hay, for example, carried resolutions in the House of Commons in 1735, but failed to carry a bill which had this object. See Eden's History, i, 396. Cooper in 1763 proposed tomake the hundred the unit. -- Nicholls's History, i, 58. Fielding proposes a similar change in London. Dean Tucker, speaks of the evil of the limited area in his Manifold Courses of the Increase of the Poor (1760).
I need only note here that the first edition of Malthus's Essay appeared in 1798, the year after Eden's publication.
Maseres, an excellent Whig, a good mathematician, and a respected lawyer, is perhaps best know at present from his portrait in Charles Lamb's Old Benchers.
It may be noticed as an anticipation of modern schemes that in 1792 Paine proposed a system of 'old age pensions', for which the necessary funds were to be easily obtained when universal peace had abolished all military charges. See State Trials, xxv. 175.
The first edition, 1795, the sixth, from which I quote, in 1800. In Bentham's Works, x, 330, it is said that in 1798, 7500 copies of this book had been sold.
In 1814 Colquohoun published an elaborate account of the Resources of the British Empire, showing similar qualities.
Wilberforce started on this plan a 'society for enforcing the king's proclamation' in 1786, which was supplemented by the society for 'the Suppresion of Vice' in 1802. I don't suppose that vice was much suppressed. Sydney Smith ridiculed its performances in the Edinburgh for 1809. The article is in his works. A more interesting society was that for 'bettering the condition of the poor,' started by Sir Thomas Bernard and Wilberforce in 1796.
History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-trade by the British Parliament (1808). Second enlarged edition 1839. The chart was one cause of the offence taken by Wilberforce's sons.
See passages collected in Birkbeck Hill's Boswell, ii, 478-80, and cf. iii, 200-204. Boswell was attracted by Clarkson, but finally made up his mind that the abolition of the slave-trade would 'shut the gates of mercy on mankind.'
Mr Conway, in his Life of Paine, attributes, I think, a little more to his hero than is consistent with due regard to his predecessors; but, in any case, he took an early part in the movement.
See the Life of Horne Tooke, by Alexander Stephens (2 vols. 8vo. 1813). John Horne added the name Tooke in 1782.
The history of these societies may be found in the trials reported in the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth volumes of Cobbett's State Trials, and in the reports of the secret committees in the thirty-first and thirty-fourth volumes of the Parl. History. There are materials in Place's papers in the British Museum which have been used in E. Smith's English Jacobins.
He was member for Old Sarum, 180102; but his career ended by a declaratory act disqualifying for a seat men who had received holy orders.
| CHAPTER III SOCIAL PROBLEMS The English Utilitarians (Vol.1) | |