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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1836 Excerpt: ...a great advance. Charitable endowments, voluntary almsgiving, and a church no less wealthy than bountiful, mitigated the sufferings of poverty in the middle ages, more effectually than is commonly believed. This state of things has, from a thousand causes, entirely changed; and great reforms (such as the abolition of slavery and villenage) have been accompanied with great evils in relation to the poor, and the provision for them. Countless questions pressed upon the consideration of legislators or rulers, and demanded instant answer. Who are the poor? What succour is the most efficacious? Must the poor be left to voluntary alms, or have they, as against the rich, a right to support which governments are bound to enforce? On all these points, no nation has made so many efforts and experiments as England, and therefore I proceed from this long, but I hope not useless introduction, to the English poof-laws. The first feeling with which one considers them is, that of astonishment at the contrast of the greatest affluence and the greatest poverty; of the vast gains, and the urgent want. Is this accidental, or is it the result of successive mistakes? or is-it the inevitable consequence of so high a state of civilization, and such enormous national power? Have not all nations reason to congratulate themselves that though their station is humbler, they have not fifty millions of thalers to pay as poor's-rate? that though they are without many comforts and enjoyments, they have fewer wants and miseries? that though they have some partial or local maladies, they are not threatened with a universal and consuming plague? Lord John Russell exclaims, " Our poor On. Government, p. 213, form an army four times as numerous as that with which we resisted the empire of F...