Poor law bastilles

2 passages · search this phrase →

Often appears with: justice as a virtue · equity, mercy, and pardon · crime and punishment · workhouse regime · malthusian punishment · laissez-faire vs active punishment · family separation · deterrence in poor law · abolition of outdoor relief

Usually: argument (2) · indignation (2) · injustice endured (1) · censure (1)

Quotable

“Good,” said they, “we grant you poor a right to exist, but only to exist; the right to multiply you have not, nor the right to exist as befits human beings.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 184 · insight

“Yet the food is supposed to be wholesome and the treatment humane with all this. But the intent of the law is too loudly outspoken for this requirement to be in any wise fulfilled.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 184 · observation

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 primary

Friedrich Engels · 1844 (as a report/study of conditions; published in Germany 1845)
Act, the Masters' and Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the representative of the working-men in the House of Commons, was the great man of the session; while the Liberal middle-class with its motion for repealing the Corn Laws, and the Radical middle-class with its resolution for refusing the taxes, played pitiable roles. Even the debates about > Act should express the time from six at night to six in the morning, whereby the prohibition of night-work came to mean the limitation of working-hours to twelve, including free hours, or ten hours of actual work a day. But the ministry did not agree to this. Sir James Graham began to threaten resignation from the Cabinet, and at the next vote on the bill the House rejected by a small majority both ten and twelve hours! Graham and Peel now announced that they should introduce a new bill, and that if this failed to pass they should resign. The new bill was exactly the old Twelve Hours' Bill with some changes of form, and the same House of Commons which had rejected the principal points of this bill in March, now swallowed it whole. The reason of this was that most of the supporters of the Ten Hours' Bill were Tories who let fall the bill rather than the ministry; but be the motives what they may, the (74/89)

Engels criticizes the Malthusian Poor Law’s cruelty, arguing that instead of abolition it creates a system designed to deter relief, letting the poor exist only as a warning while punishing “superfluous” families.

nothing, and not as the Malthusian Commissioners conclude, that poverty is a crime, and, as such, to be visited with heinous penalties which may serve as a warning to others. But these wise Malthusians were so thoroughly convinced of the infallibility of their theory that they did not for one moment hesitate to cast the poor into the Procrustean bed of their economic notions and treat them with the most revolting cr…

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 primary

He describes the operational regime of the 1834 New Poor Law workhouses—abolished outdoor relief, harsh food and work, restricted family life, and supervised visits—arguing its “spirit” makes it function as a prison.

directly or through inducing in others laziness and want of employment. Live you shall, but live as an awful warning to all those who might have inducements to become "superfluous." They accordingly brought in the New Poor Law, which was passed by Parliament in 1834, and continues in force down to the present day. All relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhou…