ABSTRACT
On the 11th March a numerous meeting was held in the Manchester Town Hall, to consider the propriety of petitioning against the renewal of the Poor-Law Amendment Act. The speakers were principally conservatives, and some ultra-radicals were with them. I did not agree with them in their admiration of the old law, under which, in the agricultural districts, much tyranny was exercised, but I said then, with reference to the workhouse, I thought there might be some reason for doubting the propriety of giving relief to the able-bodied labourers in a country free from a heavy burden of taxation, and where there was a good demand for labour; but to talk of throwing a man on his own resources in a country where his very scanty earnings were taxed to the extent of one-fourth of the whole for the purposes of the government, and his bread to the extent of another fourth for the protection of the landowners, was absurd and wicked. The chairman said: “We are not here to discuss the Corn Laws;” to which my reply was: “Nor am I; but I am here to assert that to throw the working man entirely upon his own resources when government taxation and iniquitous monopolies take away one half of his earnings is a gross outrage.”
