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NOTE BY THE EDITOR ON THE TRACTS ON POOR LAWS. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 8 (Chrestomathia, Essays on Logic and Grammar, Tracts on Poor Laws, Tracts on Spanish Affairs) [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). In 11 vols. Volume 8.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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NOTE BY THE EDITOR ON THE TRACTS ON POOR LAWS.

The following tracts which have all been previously printed, (though the last in order, is now for the first time published,) bear internal evidence that they are only a portion of what the author has written on the subject of the poor laws; he left behind him indeed a considerable number of unpublished MSS. on the subject, which on some future occasion may see the light. From the Annals of agriculture, it does not appear how far the queries there promulgated, from the answers to which the author intended to fill up the outline of his great work on pauper management, were responded to. In vol. xxix. of the Annals, (p. 556,) the Editor makes an earnest appeal to his readers on the subject, and expresses a hope that “the country gentlemen, and resident clergy, who can with so much ease satisfy many, if not all of his [Bentham’s] inquiries, will take the small trouble of sending him the particulars he requests for the parish at least in which they reside;” but it is probable that few of the persons able to supply the requisite information comprehended his enlightened views, and he seems not to have met with sufficient encouragement to induce him even to complete his outline.

It has been the practice of the Editor, on the occasion of the state of the law as it existed when the author wrote being animadverted on in the text, to mention in a note any changes that may have since taken place by statutory or other authority. In the present instance, however, the vastness of the alterations which have been made in the administration of the poor law, and especially in relation to the features chiefly noticed in these tracts, rendered it impossible to accomplish this object without introducing more extensive notes, than readers, who have so many other means of being acquainted with the subject, would have felt of service. The chief administration is, in the plan proposed by Bentham, in hands quite distinct from those in which it has been placed by the poor law amendment act: but the two systems agree in the principle of centralization. In the minutiæ of the plan so far as they are indicated in the ensuing outline, the reader will find many arrangements identical with those, of which the practical experiments, on which the new poor law is based, have led to the adoption; while many of the practical abuses attacked by the author, such as the system of settlement, the facilities for obtaining relief without submitting to labour, &c., have been duly acknowledged and rectified. But perhaps the most remarkable illustrations of the author’s practical segacity, are to be found in his anticipations of the civilizing benefits of such alterations as he suggests; benefits which may have then appeared as the wildest Utopianism, but which have of late been on so large a scale, practically and speedily realized. A comparison of the effects which the author expects to arise from his plans of juvenile training and apprenticeship, may be viewed as a text, of which the report on the training of pauper children presented in the year 1841 to the secretary of state by the poor law commissioners, may be considered as forming a series of practical illustrations.