488
ON THE POOR LAWS.
in Guilford Street—is no longer a foundling hospital at all; having, by the rules in force for the last sixty or seventy years, never received one single foundling, properly so called, within its walls. The same improvement was effected by my Right Honourable Friend, the President of the Board of Control,* with respect to the Foundling Hospital in Dublin, when he filled the office of Secretary for Ireland. Any hospital for the reception of foundlings is the worst of charities: it is no charity—it is a public nuisance, and ought to be stripped of the title of charity, and put down as an outrage on public morals. So all now allow ; but fifty years ago no man would have dared to say so. Can we doubt that in much less than half a century more, all those other principles now made the butt of low ignorant abuse, will be the admitted guide and belief of every member of the community ? If such as I have stated be the rules which public safety prescribes for regulating even voluntary charities, only see how the Poor Laws of this country violate rules a thousand times more applicable to the raising and dispensing of a compulsory provision ! They have succeeded in wholly disconnecting the ideas of labour and its reward in the minds of the people—they have encouraged the idle and the profligate, at the expense of the honest and industrious—they have destroyed the independence of the peasant, and made him the creature of a pernicious and forced charity—they have given him the degradation of a beggar, without the consolation with which benevolence soothes the lot of mendicity. Parish allowance is far worse than any dole of private charity, because it is more likely to be abused—because it is more certain in its nature—because it is better known, more established—because it * Mr Charles Grant (now Lord Glenelg).