ABSTRACT
We have observed that broadly speaking the whole elaborate apparatus of the Elizabethan poor laws was never brought fully into operation at any time during the course of our era and, save for a brief period of fairly extensive trial under the somewhat excited direction of Archbishop Laud, was never generally tried at all. The burden of responsibility for the care of the poor and for the enlargement of social opportunity was borne by private charity which created massive endowments for the founding and fashioning of the basic institutions of the liberal society. The great corpus of Elizabethan law was, as we have seen, a prudential system, framed to protect the society and the state against the threat of social disaster which might have become very real indeed had not private men acted so quickly, so generously, and so intelligently as they addressed themselves to the mastery of the transcendent problems of their age. The state had taken the necessary resolution to move into a vast area of need when circumstances should require, but a whole system of ideas, of ideals, and of institutions which we describe as liberal resulted from the fact that a great outpouring of private wealth dedicated to social ends made any substantial sovereign intervention unnecessary. An historical decision of very great moment was perhaps unwittingly taken by private donors of all classes, but most importantly by those of the merchant elite, which initiated not only the fashioning of adequate social institutions for the nation but also the fashioning of an ethic of social responsibility which was to be the hall-mark of the liberal society. Very generally, one may say that the bulwarks raised by private generosity against poverty, disease, ignorance, and impotence remained sufficient until they were overwhelmed by the forces loosed by the Industrial Revolution, which in England and the western world made necessary the direct and ultimately the massive intervention of the state in order to ensure the welfare, perhaps the survival, of large masses of men chronically in danger from, when they had not been rendered permanent casualties by, the complex society which is the modern industrial economy. Surely it is not too much to say that our ideals and our social ethic are still largely ail inheritance from the earner age with which this study is concerned. Men of our generation do not fully realize that an immensely significant social revolution has occurred over the course of the past century which has left them all citizens of a welfare state. This encompassing historical reality must in turn require from our society an accommodation in ideals, in social and political theory, and doubtless in institutions which may well move it far from the bases upon which it has reposed since the seventeenth century.The Elizabethan poor laws were prudential; in a very true sense we may say that mankind did not have fully to impose them until our own generation.
