ABSTRACT
The Poor Law Commission was set up in February 1832, before the Reform Bill was passed, by the unreformed parliament. Its members were the Bishop of London-Or. Blomfield-as chairman, the Bishop of Chester, Nassau Senior the economist, Sturges Bourne, an ex-Home Secretary who had been involved in an earlier attempt to reform the Poor Laws, four other people not so well knownHenry Bishop, Henry Gawler, W. Coulson and James Trail, and later on a youngish man who was then little known, Edwin Chadwick. The terms of references were wide. They were
to make a diligent and full enquiry into the practical operation of the laws for the relief of the poor in England and Wales, and in the manner in which those laws were administered; and to report whether any and what alterations, amendments or improvements may be beneficially made in the said laws, or in the manner of administering them, and how the same may best be carried into effect. The Commission was empowered to appoint Assistant
Commissioners to act as fact-finders, and one of these--
Chadwick-was eventually made a full Commissioner, and another, Dr. Kay, later Kay-Shuttleworth, was to become one of our leading educationalists. The Commission's report had its faults: its statistics were thin, it inflated the number of able-bodied on outdoor relief and it did not examine the cause of poverty. These faults were faults of the times, for few figures were available, there was no machinery for collecting them, the day of the sample survey was a long way off, and' as far as poverty was concerned, its cause was known. It lay in human failing.
