act of 13 and 14 Charles II., c. 12, commonly called the Act of Settlement. The preamble of the act testifies the fact of pauperism continuing to make head against all attempts at restraining it. For remedy of these evils, it was now "enacted that it should be lawful for any two justices of the peace, upon complaint made by the church wardens or overseer of the poor, within forty days after the arrival of a new comer in the parish, to remove him by force to the parish where he was last legally settled, unless he could give security against becoming burdensome where he was living, to the satisfaction of the two justices." This was no remedy. This did not go to the heart of the subject, viz., what was the cause of the increase? no one of the lawmakers or schemers (and there were hundreds of them) ever had head or heart enough to face that. The real cause was two very important subjects, and both pulling one way, in favour of the rich and against the poor, viz., the increase in the taxation, and the increase in bills of enclosure to enclose the waste lands and commons, from which the poor derived much benefit. The real thought always uppermost was, "He that is rich, why, let him richer grow: If poor, what harm if we increase his wo!" All the good of this act of settlement was, to make large harvests for the lawyers, in debating about these respective parishes where the poor man had been previously settled. But this was not all; for, while it circumscribed the liberty of the English poor man, the native poor, it left the stranger from Scotland and Ireland unmolested. They might come and settle down, or move about, and there was no power to molest them, it being well known he could not claim relief if he wanted any. But, then, every one of their children could, in any parish wherever it was born-exhibiting a curious example of "liberty with impunity plucking justice by the nose. An extract from a work "Concerning the Relief and Employment of the Poor," from Sir Josiah Childs' "New Discourses of Trade," published 1668, a few years after this act of settlement, will exhibit the effect of this portion of England's laws, which, in the mass, are said to be "the gathered wisdom of a thousand years." His description of the poor is wretched in the extreme. In illustration of the combined cruelty and inefficacy of "the shifting off, sending, or whipping back the poor wanderers to the place of their birth or last place of abode," which was then going on in all parts of the kingdom, is as follows: "A poor, idle person, that will not work, or that nobody will employ in the country, comes up to London to set up the trade of begging; such a person probably begs up and down the streets seven years-it may be sevenand-twenty-before anybody asketh why she doth so; and, if at length she hath the ill hap in some parish to meet with a more vigilant beadle than one in twenty of them are, all he does is, to lead her the length of five or six houses, into another parish, and then concludes he hath done the part of a most diligent officer. But suppose he should go farther, to the end of his line-which is the line of the law, and the perfect execution of his office—which is, to take the poor creature before a magistrate, and he would order the delinquent to be whipped and sent from parish to parish, to the place of her or his last abode, (which not one justice of twenty would do through pity or other cause ;) even this is a great charge upon the nation, and yet the business of the country itself left wholly undone; for no sooner doth the delinquent arrive at the assigned parish, but, for fear of shame or idleness, or want of some one's commiseration there in employing her, she presently deserts it, and wanders back upon another route, hoping for better fortune; while the parish to which she is sent, knowing her a lazy person, and perhaps a worse qualified one, is as willing to be rid of her as she is to be gone from that place." The first information I can find regarding the amount of the poor rates, is a statement in a pamphlet published 1673, entitled "The Grand Concern of England explained in several proposals offered to the consideration of parliament," &c. This author estimates the sum then expended on the relief of the poor at nearly £840,000 per year. Another writer estimates the poor rate at upward of £700,000.* But Davenant, in his Essay upon Ways and Means," published 1695, "collected with great labour and expense, by Mr. Arthur Moore, a very knowing person," presents an estimate from each county toward the end of Charles II.'s reign, and makes the whole for England and Wales to be £665,362. From an entry in the parish-book of St. Olave's, London, there was paid £4 3s. for relief of poor Irish and English children to be transported to America, 1642. About twenty years past I read the following curious paragraph in a London newspaper: "A man was brought before a magistrate for neglecting his wife. He married a woman of St. Ann's parish, Soho; the wedding portion was £3: it was the third time he had served the parish in this manner. It appears to have become a custom for the London parishes, when they got an old woman likely to live some years, to marry * England's "Improvement by Sea and Land," &c., 1677. her off, and give a premium; she then no longer belongs to that parish, but to the parish of the husband." REVENUE. The AT the accession of King James, 1603, (after Queen Elizabeth,) the most ancient revenue of the crown, that arising from its landed estates, amounted only to £32,000 per year. feudal prerogative of purveyance, wardship, &c., also still continued to be regularly exercised, and their ordinary produce may be estimated from the offer of the parliament in 1609, to compound for the whole by a yearly allowance of £200,000. In 1609 James raised £21,800 by a tax of 20s. on every knight's fee, and on every 20s. of annual rent from lands immediately held of the crown on the occasion of his eldest son, Prince Henry, being made a knight; and in 1612 he obtained, in like manner, £20,500 on the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. At the commencement of his reign the customs of tunnage and poundage were as usual granted for the king's life; and, not satisfied with this act of bounty and confidence, James, a few years afterward, proceeded to raise the rates of these duties by his own authority-an exertion of prerogative which, although not altogether unprecedented, (for both Mary and Elizabeth had done the same thing,) occasioned much alarm at the time, and may be regarded as the cause which ultimately drove on the parties, on the accession of James's son, Charles I., from a war of words to a war of swords. When James came to the throne the customs yielded a revenue of £127,000 per year. In 1613 they produced about £148,000; and at the close, (1625,) £190,000. All the parliamentary supplies granted during this reign were nine subsidies and ten-fifteenths-a subsidy yielding about £70,000, and a fifteenth about £36,500; so that from this source James scarcely derived, on the whole, £1,100,000, or not quite £50,000 per year. Eleven subsidies from the clergy at the rate of 4s., and one at the rate of 6s. in the pound, produced him in all about £250,000 more. Other schemes to which he had recourse for raising a revenue, may be classed under the head of irregular, if not illegal, expedients. Titles of nobility were sold for specific sums: that of a baron, £10,000; that of a viscount for £20,000; that of an earl for £30,000. About £225,000 in all was obtained by the sale of the new dignity of baronet, instituted 1611, at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Shirley. This is the lowest hereditary title, and it does not constitute a par liamentary peer. James also made a great deal of money by the sale of patents for monopolies, till the abuse, after having repeatedly excited the indignation of parliament and the public at large, produced the decisive proceedings in parliament, and the statute of 1623, which declares that all monopolies are contrary to law, and henceforth to be utterly void and of none effect-reserving to the kings a prerogative of only granting a fourteen years' privilege or monopoly for any new invention. Considerable sums were exacted from the subject, at different times in the course of this reign, under the old false names of loans and benevolences; the so called lending and voluntary contribution being both alike really compulsory. The heavy fines which it was the custom for the star chamber (a real iniquitous inquisition) and other courts to impose upon delinquents, also yielded something. And James, Scotchmanlike, knew " every little makes a mickle," screwed this peg as hard as he could, though without yielding much money, if it be true, as is asserted, that fines, nominally amounting to £184,000, were actually compounded for about £16,000 or £18,000. To this sum may be added about £4000, realized from fines for the violation of the several proclamations against additional building in and about London. James finally received back from France £60,000 of the debt which Henry IV. had incurred to Queen Elizabeth; and he got from the Dutch £250,000 on surrendering to them the cautionary towns of Flushing, Brille, and Ramikins; besides a tribute for the privilege of fishing on the British coast. On the whole, according to a published official report going over the first fourteen years of the reign of James, his ordinary income for that period averaged about £450,000 per year; besides which, he had received in the course of the fourteen years about £2,000,000 (in this £90,000 per annum secret service) in extraordinary or occasional payments, making the entire annual revenue of the crown somewhat under £600,000. The expenditure at first exceeded this sum by about £80,000; afterward by between £30,000 and £40,000 a year; so that, by the year 1610, James had incurred a debt of £300,000.* The following short abstract will show the fiscal system of England: 1603. On the accession of King James I., 1625. do do do Charles I., £600,000 896,819 During the whole of this king's reign, whose head they cut off, it did not average one million. * An abstract or brief declaration of the present state of his majesty's revenue, 1651, and printed in second volume of Somers' Tracts. William and Mary, Queen Anne, 1704. George I., (House of Brunswick,) 1727. George II., 1760. George III., 1820. George IV., 1830. William IV., The expense of collecting during this last reign amounted to between four and five millions annually. In earlier reigns there were no regular taxes; the kings managed to rub along with the rents from crown lands, aids of the barons, benevolences from the church, and squeezings from the Jews. Before the reign of William III. the house of commons was somewhat an effectual check on the expenses of the government; in the fourth year of his reign began the borrowing of money, to be paid out of future taxes. Up to the reign of George the III. the taxes did not much exceed eight millions; but before the close of that warlike reign they amounted to eighty millions; and in one year the expenditure by taxes and loans reached one hundred and twenty millions. App. vi. It will, therefore, appear that our ancestors were not driven out, as they are at the present day, by excessive taxation. The sole cause of their honourable exile was either civil or religious motives, or perhaps both. Taxation is now unbearable, and the people leave. "Unto this shore they press, a countless throng, And leave their burthens for the rest to bear; In 1660 began the present custom-house system. In 1668 began the board of trade recommended by Lord Shaftesbury it did not continue long, but was revived again in 1696. Cromwell's income is stated to have been one and a half million per year. An extraordinary expenditure was necessary as long as the civil war lasted; but neither the cost of the war nor the waste of it is supposed to have swallowed up the larger portion of the large sums that came into the hands of the government. If we may believe the representations of the royalists and of the Presbyterians, the parliament itself was the great gulf into which the ever-flowing stream of confiscation and plunder chiefly poured itself. There may be some tendency |