ABSTRACT
ANTERIOR to the inquiry of 1832-34, the most important document in Poor Law controversy had been the report of the committee of 1817, commonly known as Sturges Bourne's Oommittee. That report was drafted by Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis, a fact which is interesting in view of his subsequent appointment as one of the first Oommissioners under the new Poor Law. It contains a diagnosis of the disease of pauperism, and a warning as to the danger in which the country stood, quite as explicit as anything which is contained in the more celebrated report of 1834. "Unless some efficacious check be interposed, there is every reason to think that the amount of the assessment will continue, as it has done, to increase, till, at a period more or less remote, it shall have absorbed the profits of the property on which the rate may have been assessed, producing thereby the neglect or ruin of the land, the waste or removal of other property, and the utter subversion of that happy order of society so long upheld in these kingdoms." The philosophic part of the report, as it was afterwards called, contained reflections of this character, and adopted the view of Ricardo and
Malthus, that a Poor Law was a measure of extreme danger, if not of unavoidable ruin; but though calling for an efficacious check, it failed to indicate how such a check could be applied.
