第64章 Chapter III(5)

Meanwhile their opponents were equally ready to see nothing in it but Malthus,and to denounce it with corresponding bitterness.It was contrary to Christianity to the rights of man,and to the good old laws of England.It was a part of the machinery by which cold-blooded economists were enslaving the poor.The operative,says the Chartist historian,(16)thought that it broke the last link in the chain of sympathy between rich and poor.Prison-like workhouses were rising to remind the poor of their 'coming doom.'They could expect nothing but 'misery in the present,and the Bastille in the future,in which they were to be immured when their rich oppressor no longer required their services.'The historian of the factory movement(17)confirms this statement.The poor man was to work or starve.Poverty,then,was to be treated as a crime.The parochial system was to be broken up,and the clergy thus separated from the poor.The whole system was anti-Christian:had not the commissioners put out a warning against alms-giving?(18)The commissioners again proposed the emigration of pauperised agricultural labourers into manufacturing districts,and were so playing into the hands of the capitalists.Cobbett's view gave the keynote to another version of the case.He saw as clearly as any one the evils of pauperisation,but the old law at least admitted the poor man's right to support.In good old times he had been supported by the church.The great robbery at the Reformation had been partly compensated by the poor-law.To abolish or restrict the old right was to consummate the abominable robbery and to fleece the poor man more thoroughly at the bidding of 'parson Malthus.'Cobbett's view not only commended itself to his own class,but was more or less that of the 'Young Englanders,'who aspired to a reconstruction of the old social order.The Times denounced the new law bitterly,and its proprietor,Walter,thought (as Kydd says),and no doubt thought rightly,that the indignation roused by the measure had done much to foster Chartism.(19)Meanwhile,to Mill and his friends the whole of this declamation came under the head of the later 'sentimentalism.'They held with Malthus that an unlimited right to support meant an indefinite multiplication of poverty.To admit the right was to undertake an impossible task and provoke a revolution on its inevitable failure.Right must be based upon fact;and it is idle to neglect the inevitable conditions of human life.This position might be logically unassailable;and the measure supported on the strength of it is now admitted to have been a vast reform.It came to be cited as one of the claims to gratitude of the economists.Their science had arrested an evil which appeared to be almost incurable.Sound reason had again triumphed over vague sentimentalism.The new law was,however,still given as an illustration of the heartlessness of political economists.Mill,who might claim justly that he was as anxious as any one to raise the poor,had sorrowfully to admit that the masses were too ignorant and their leaders too sentimental to recognise his good intentions.They took the surgeon for an assassin.