Speenhamland, 1795 [
83 ]
earners themselves, even though this meant depriving them of their
legal claim to subsistence. The "right to live" had proved a death trap
to them.
The paradox was merely apparent. Allegedly, Speenhamland
meant that the Poor Law was to be administered liberally—actually, it
was turned into the opposite of its original intent. Under Elizabethan
Law the poor were forced to work at whatever wages they could get and
only those who could obtain no work were entitled to relief; relief in
aid of wages was neither intended nor given. Under the Speenhamland
Law a man was relieved even if he was in employment, as long as his
wages amounted to less than the family income granted to him by the
scale. Hence, no laborer had any financial interest in satisfying his em-
ployer, his income being the same whatever wages he earned; this was
different only in case standard wages, i.e., the wages actually paid, ex-
ceeded the scale, an occurrence which was not the rule in the country-
side since the employer could obtain labor at almost any wages; how-
ever little he paid, the subsidy from the rates brought the workers'
income up to scale. Within a few years the productivity of labor began
to sink to that of pauper labor, thus providing an added reason for em-
ployers not to raise wages above the scale. For once the intensity of la-
bor, the care and efficiency with which it was performed, dropped be-
low a definite level, it became indistinguishable from "boondoggling"
or the semblance of work maintained for the sake of appearances.
Though in principle work was still enforced, in practice outdoor relief
became general and even when relief was administered in the poor-
house, the enforced occupation of the inmates now hardly deserved
the name of work. This amounted to the abandonment of Tudor legis-
lation not for the sake of less but of more paternalism. The extension
of outdoor relief, the introduction of aid-in-wages supplemented by
separate allowances for wife and children, each item rising and falling
with the bread price, meant a dramatic reentry in regard to labor of
that same regulative principle that was being rapidly eliminated in re-
gard to industrial life as a whole.
No measure was ever more universally popular.* Parents were free
of the care of their children, and children were no more dependent
upon parents; employers could reduce wages at will and laborers were
safe from hunger whether they were busy or slack; humanitarians ap-
* Meredith, H.
O., Outlines of the Economic History of England, 1908.