504
ON THE POOR LAWS.
endowment, by voluntary subscription. Mr Baron Bailey, himself a large contributor to these, as he is to all benevolent institutions, proposed to establish a rule, that no tradesman on the Committee of Management, should be employed in supplying the institutions in question, because it was justly apprehended by the learned Judge, that where such persons were interested, there would be no very rigorous inquiry into the necessity of making the purchases, and no very strict audit of the accounts. Nevertheless, the proposition, though tending to save the funds, and therefore required by the pecuniary interests of the body who raised those funds, was rejected by a great majority of the Committee, who were themselves contributors. They said that they had always been in the habit of employing one another to supply the institution, and that they were determined to continue the practice. The custom of another charity in the same neighbourhood was apparently better—but really just the same. There, a bye-law was in force, that no man should be employed as a tradesman to the charity while he was upon the managing committee. But this check was defeated by having a double set of tradesmen, who belonged to the committee in alternate years, and were employed each in his turn as he went out of office. I believe a proposal was made to correct this gross abuse ; but, like the suggestion of Mr Baron Bailey, it was rejected by the subscribers, to save whose money it was brought forward. Here, then, we find men in the disbursement of their own funds, and in pursuit of their own objects, determined to suffer, with their eyes open, abuses which daily defraud them, and persisting in a course which makes it unavoidable that their pockets should be picked before their eyes. But do not facts like these demonstrate how long a vicious system may continue