ABSTRACT
Now we must turn our attention back to England, as Napier himself finally began to do. What could be done about the poor? One particular solution to the great question of social injustice seemed to present itself to a few English thinkers in this period. Why not send the poor abroad and then send men like Napier to rule them? Rather than acceding to the rigours of the New Poor Law of 1834 – being locked up, separated from their families, set to backbreaking work, and given the least and worst – the English poor could simply depart. Emigration was the key, said Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who recently had burst upon the English scene as the next great prophet of social reform.
