may safely infer therefore that the case is understated, by assuming the cost to have averaged £26 per annum during the ten years ending 1852. Thus we see at a glance the enormous tax that is imposed upon the industrious to maintain the profligate and the criminal, a tax amounting to nearly £14,000 per annum. In ten

years the sum of £138,840 has been spent in maintaining and clothing and guarding of prisoners, a sum about equal to the estimated annual value of the land. and buildings as rated to the poor in the whole of the Union of Blything-a union that extends over an area of 29,000 acres. During the five years ending 1852, 255 prisoners were sentenced to transportation. The average cost of these may be estimated at £100 each; this gives an additional expense of £5,000 per annum, or £50,000 in ten years. The cost of the police may be estimated at £11,000 per annum. The rural police of the Eastern Division alone cost in 1850, on an average of three years, £5,492. The late Lord Rendlesham stated the cost of the police in the Western Division to be £4,629 per annum, and in 1851 we find the entire cost of the rural police of the county entered at £12,176, and this is exclusive of their cost at Ipswich and Bury St. Edmund's. The annual cost of prosecutions average about £4,000; the conveyance of prisoners to gaol, £350; and the Shire Hall, Judges' Lodgings, etc., £500 per annum. The items of our annual expenditure will form rather a formidable amount when collected together.

It thus appears that the cost of watching, seizing, detaining, examining, committing, trying, and finally imprisoning and transporting these miserable outcasts of society in the county of Suffolk, during the ten years ending 1852, was nearly equal to £350,000, and this is exclusive of the cost incurred by persons committed under the summary powers of the magistrates and the value of the property stolen.

There is one feature in the distribution of the expenses of gaols, police, and other machinery kept up by crime, which seems to us to be recommended by common sense, and based on a principle of natural justice. In examining the causes of crime, we have seen that game lands and beer houses are breeding grounds and training schools of crime. An extra proportion of criminals are sent from the neighbourhoods of game estates, and universally testimony will convict beer-shops and many public houses also, as hot beds of crime. Why, then, should we not charge an extra rate upon all this property, and thus make the parties pay extra for the evil which they have caused? Why should we not tax largely those districts that are really manufactories of criminals? Is it not clear to all of us that those things which cause moral delinquency, and multiply the temptations to crime, should be made to assist in an extra degree to pay the cost of imprisonment and support the mechanism of cure?

CHAPTER VI.

PAUPERISM, PAST AND PRESENT.

PAUPERISM! what a theme! what a brood of evils are engendered by this one! The extent of moral and social evil flowing from this social malady, as well as the pecuniary loss that is incurred, it is difficult to determine. It is the plague spot of this county; a social cancer preying upon the vitals of the community, and festering away the self-respect, independence, and industry of almost every class of our working population. Our permanent and hereditary paupers are a very numerous class. At the census in 1851 it was found that 65 in every 10,000 persons in Great Britain were paupers. In Suffolk the paupers numbered 153 in every 10,000 persons enumerated. On the average of the five years ending March, 1853, no less than 26,582 persons have annually received parochial relief. One out of every 12 of our population is a pauper, and the cost of supporting what Thomas Carlyle aptly designates "this army of paupers," has, during the five years ending March, 1852, averaged £142,688 per annum. These figures demonstrate the existence of an enormous burthen, indicating clearly enough the direct loss we annually sustain by pauperism-a loss in pounds, shillings, and pence more than equal to the nett rental of the whole of the land and buildings in the Union

of Mutford, and in the towns of Lowestoft, Woodbridge, Stowmarket, Hadleigh, Debenham, Halesworth, Framlingham, Saxmundham, Southwold, and Clare.

But severe as this pecuniary loss undoubtedly is, the workings of this social evil are still more lamentable when viewed in its moral and social aspects. Taking the laborers as a mass, it is evident that the allowance from the poor's-rate is their resource in sickness and old age. The force of old associations and the habitual custom of applying for parochial relief have operated so strongly, that they never feel the shame or the degradation of pauperism. The feelings of respect and attachment to their superiors have perished under the operation of the system, and they are replaced by a cringing disposition which is too often fostered by employers; and, worst of all, the habits of industry having been gradually undermined, a large class of laborers are really insensible to the honest spirit of independence.

It is somewhat singular that a question involving, as it does, the pecuniary interests and the social welfare of all classes, and which has pressed unusually heavy upon the rate-payers of this county-which has in more than one instance caused disturbances in the district, bringing down the "Times' Commissioner " to make inquiries should not have excited among the owners and occupiers a greater degree of attention. There are many branches of this great social problem that are invested with a great degree of interest, as well as importance. The Law of Settlement, the unequal burden of poor's-rate in different parishes, the indiscriminate association of the depraved wandering mendicant and the resident resident pauper, the schools of industry for workhouse children, and employment for the able-bodied poor, so as to reduce the amount of poor's-rates-these are points of the greatest importance to the community generally, and of peculiar interest

better means of aiding in the solution of the problem. It might have been vain to expect, that during the late agitation for "protection" which absorbed for a long period the attention of the leading men of the county, any close application would be given to a particular branch of social economy. The struggle has hitherto been for political rather than social reform; but now that the "question of questions" is in all probability finally settled, there is reason to hope that pauperism and its demoralising consequences will meet with the attention of the rate-payers, and the sympathy and support of the philanthropic of this district.

Too much, however, must not be expected, as there prevails among the inhabitants a dread of attacking time-honored institutions and customs; they seem more disposed than the people of manufacturing districts to bear easily the burden of social evils; they put up with abuses, and want others to commence the onslaught. They will follow, but fear to lead. After Mr. Mott, the Assistant Poor Law Commissioner, had visited Suffolk in 1834, and examined the books and accounts of the several parishes, he declared that charges the most barefaced and inconsistent had been submitted to by the farmers and rate-payers, and that almost every species of trickery was developed by the examination; that in Gloucestershire, with farmers for overseers and rate-payers who attended the vestry, the poor's-rate for the county averaged 8s. 11d. per head on the population of 1831, while in Suffolk, during the same period, where the vestry was neglected and the office of overseer was filled by a much less respectable class of persons, the cost averaged 18s. 10d. per head over the entire county. The want of energy that induced them to disregard their own interests at that period, is still a characteristic of the rate-payers of this district.