ABSTRACT
IN noticing the Act of 1846 we reserved the difficult question of removal and settlement for separate treatment. As already remarked, settlement, i.e. the conception that a poor man is chargeable for relief at one place rather than everywhere, is an integral part of the earlier English Poor Law system. We have already argued that the further emancipation of British industry by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was a necessary and logical corollary of the reform of the Poor Law in 1834. The repeal of the Corn Laws, in its turn, in so much as it seemed likely to alter largely the course of British enterprise, furnished again a cogent reason for removing the remaining restrictions which impeded the free passage of labour from one industry to another. The reform of the Poor Law, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the abolition of parochial settlement, are all parts of the same economic movement. Alluding to the intended policy of the Government in this respect, Sir Robert Peel, ill introducing his Corn Law measure, said that by dealing with the question of settlement, "we propose not only to relieve the land,
but to do an act of justice to the labouring man." If agriculture was now put on an equal commercial basis with other industries, it was obviously more impolitic than ever that labour should be confined to agricultural centres, and that agricultural landowners and occupiers should be responsible for the Poor Law maintenance of persons whose whole working lives were spent away from their place of settlement in other forms of industry. Political empiricism deals with these subjects separately, but they are all illustrations of one and the same principle.
